SCIENCE IN MANCHESTER,

FOR THE FIRST CENTENARY OF THE

LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY.

APRIL 1881.

CHAPTER I.

GENERAL.

We have lived as a society for a hundred years, and seen the early years of Steam, Electricity, and Chemistry; we have heard our own words repeated by metals that had learnt our language, and the sound of our own voices carried forward by a beam of light as if we were at last having some promise of communicating with beings of other worlds and of other ages long gone by. It is natural at such a stage that we should look round and consider what we have done to assist the world in this great advance, and to seek to know if we have deserved to live in such an age.

We are quite aware that we have been in a county which has shown us little sympathy by any of its acts, and that we are looked on as some old deserted church in a great city, or as a community united by an interest in a region of fancy or of thought, but not of action, and

scarcely conversant with the world around them. But it will not be difficult to show that these opinions are far from being correct, that thoughts have gone out from this society piercing far into the future, and that some have been sent here by nature from distant space; and that instead of neglecting the world around them our members have been keen in detecting its requirements, and some of them far-sighted beyond the rest of men in seeing improvements. We have paid of late little attention to the historic past; our past has been chiefly in geological eras.

We must not be considered arrogant if we claim for our members to have finished two great stages of a course of thought with which the world long toiled, begun east of Greece and keenly contested and grown old, although unsettled in the times when the Greek intellect was most powerful; and more than that, to have carried it beyond the farthest point which by them was seen or hoped for. We allude to questions regarding the constitution of matter, which is now generally considered proved to consist of definite particles forming at least one stage of existence, although it may be that these particles themselves are differently formed, leading us to the still unsettled portion of the atomic theory, a division unknown to the ancients. We have finished one part, we have cleared the ground for discussing the other. One of our members may be said to have established the great science of chemistry on this basis of the atom. He carried our thoughts beyond the stage of definite volume and went to the immediate consequences of its existence, namely constancy and exactness of composition in chemical substances, and we may say in all matter.

Another of our members has led the world from atomic equivalents in chemical combinations to the equivalents of

heat and other forces of the universe. Do not wonder then if we consider such men portions of that great race of thinkers which includes many of the finest names from Leucippus and Epicurus to Lucretius, and onwards to Newton and modern science; we certainly may claim for them to be more than a link in the chain of thought, although we may be obliged to leave unlifted the very weight and precious burden itself which the chain was intended to bring up from the deep well of truth.

It is well for us to see the relation in which we have stood to the progress of mankind; but whilst we speak as if the town in which we live had little conscious sympathy with us, we must not suppose ourselves independent of it, or forget the strange rules of social progress, or the effects which great communities have upon individual efforts, unconsciously exercised by the majority and producing results the origin of which is quite unknown either to them or to the minority. This great subject we may leave for a time to the readers of Lewes and of Herbert Spencer, ourselves however being convinced that the modes of communication are more observable in society than in the individual man, whose life comes out of an infinite darkness. Whilst few of the great community around this Society gave us any of its thoughts and none gave us any of its wealth, it is certain that without its activity the society would not have lived; but as a living being sends out its energies to form a finger, a foot, or a brain, each of which may exist without either of the others, so in some more or less clear way the community of South Lancashire urged the thoughts which led to the establishment of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester. The formal origin however is well known, and has no more of the

mysterious than all nature shows; it is explained in the first volume of the Society's Memoirs, and will be repeated here in due time.

Notwithstanding this, the growth of such an institution, standing out by itself in provincial England, is a phenomenon which requires attention, because the city contained only 27,246 inhabitants in 1773, when the Society was collecting its strength but had not yet assumed a name. We have many cities as large in our times, but we have few with the vigour of early Manchester, and that apparent prevision and real confidence in the future which men feel to be equal to a powerful argument and one that wins when reason fails.

We remember being told of certain difficulties in managing the workers of a mill at Oldham, and it was asked why not have bought or built a mill at some other place, since you knew how difficult it was to begin at that town? The reply was a typical one, 'The peculiar thread spun at Oldham can be spun nowhere else at present, because generations have grown into the habit.' And so the life of a place becomes characteristic because the early inhabitants had their peculiarities; in the same way, when a little village of last century with an unusual sound of a letter or a word becomes in the course of less than a century a large city, it is observed that every one is subdued by the peculiarity of the early typical individuals, and follows the same occupation with the same speech and manners, and notably the same pronunciation of one specially marked letter.

It matters not if people come from a different country, their children become initiated into the peculiarities of this 'Percival's Works, vol. iv.

spot, taught by the children of the place, which children are more powerful teachers than the wisest men or tenderest mothers, and so we have a burr in one place and aspirated vowels in another. Thus too, Manchester has in its modes of thinking grown by concretions so constant and regular that it resembles more the great crystal produced in a mass of incongruous matter; simply because there was in solution sufficient of its own kind to prefer the original shape of the small accidental parent crystal, and to leave all the incongruity behind it whilst it grew in size and in precision of character more fully than the germ crystal itself, which however still kept leading the type. In following out the comparison we may wonder, exactly as young and even old chemists do, how much of the incongruous matter there really was to the small amount crystallised, so we must wonder how few in a great city cared for the Society, how many were suited for the peculiar trade and commerce of the place, how many business men were to be found in it, whilst few of them in a whole century have cared for science by itself. No society has been more entirely dependent on the men who at the time formed its attending members. Whilst out of a great community these members must be considered few, of these few those who have attended have been, as is always the case, fewer; and of these again the active have been only a small part; but not the less there has been a law in the recesses of humanity which has caused the influence of the community to concentrate itself, first into the Society, and then through particular members, into the theory of chemistry, equivalents of atoms and their connection with mechanical force, the knowledge of which must influence mankind for ever.