Report of the ... Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Volume 28

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Page xvii - To give a stronger impulse and a more systematic direction to scientific inquiry, — to promote the intercourse of those -who cultivate Science in different parts of the British Empire, with one another and with foreign philosophers, — to obtain a more general attention to the objects of Science, and a removal of any disadvantages of a public kind which impede its progress.
Page lii - We have high, towers, the highest about half a mile in height, and some of them likewise set upon high mountains, so that the vantage of the hill with the tower is, in the highest of them, three miles at least. And these places we call the upper region; accounting the air between the high places and the low as a middle region.
Page lii - We represent small sounds as great and deep; likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds.
Page 187 - I am not very willing that any language should be totally extinguished. The similitude and derivation of languages afford the most indubitable proof of the traduction of nations, and the genealogy of mankind. They add often physical certainty to historical evidence; and often supply the only evidence of ancient migrations, and of the revolutions of ages which left no written monuments behind them.
Page xcii - ... of the year when food was scarcest; they would also rear more young, which would tend to inherit these slight peculiarities. The less fleet ones would be rigidly destroyed. I can see no more reason to doubt that these causes in a thousand generations would produce a marked effect, and adapt the form of the fox or dog to the catching of hares instead of rabbits, than that greyhounds can be improved by selection and careful breeding.
Page xcix - It is a complete example — history does not afford its equal — of an army, after a great disaster arising from its neglects, having been brought into the highest state of health and efficiency. It is the whole experiment on a colossal scale. In all other examples the last step has been wanting to complete the solution of the problem. We had in the first seven months of the Crimean campaign a mortality among...
Page ciii - When man shall be brought to acknowledge (as truth must finally constrain him to acknowledge) that it is by his own hand, through bis neglect of a few obvious rules, that the seeds of disease are most lavishly sown within his frame, and diffused over communities ; when he shall have required of medical science to occupy itself...
Page lii - The End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things ' ; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.
Page lxiv - For there is no comparison between that which we may lose by not trying and by not succeeding; since by not trying we throw away the chance of an immense good; by not succeeding we only incur the loss of a little human labour.
Page xcii - To give an imaginary example from changes in progress on an island, let the organization of a canine animal which preyed chiefly on rabbits, but sometimes on hares, become slightly plastic; let these same changes cause the number of rabbits very slowly to decrease, and the number of hares to increase; the effect of this would...

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