Since then the most noticeable figures have been 1855--2,133, 1861--3,138; while 1887 crowns the list with 3,838. The figures necessarily are to some extent governed by the importance or attractiveness of the towns at which the meetings are held. The names on the books of the society are more than half a million. So progressive a thing is English science. The meeting itself is only a part of the work done. Throughout the year committees are investigating various branches of science prominent at the moment, and preparing their reports to be included in the Annual General Report, a document of over 1,000 pages. Social satire at first made merry over the learned ladies and gentlemen who combined mutual laudation of themselves with picnics, excursions and pleasure parties of all sorts in interesting neighbourhoods at the most agreeable season of the year. To-day no one denies the British Association the credit of having promoted the discovery of new facts in science, or at least having been the first agency to draw public attention to them. Within the last few years, it was at one of these Association meetings (Liverpool 1870) that Professor Huxley pronounced against the popular theory of spontaneous generation of the lower forms of life, thus placing on record his adherence to the theory of biogenesis as opposed to abiogenesis; life, in other words, could in every grade of creation only come from life, not from the corruption of death. Thus was a physical tradition that from the earliest times down to the seventeenth century had held its own, finally repudiated by the greatest authority of his day on all biological matters.
Even this pronouncement seems to have been anticipated. A physicist less famous than Huxley, Schwann, some half a century before Huxley's day, is said to have been the first to criticize the abiogenesis doctrine as supported by no sufficient evidence. The tendency towards unity in multiplicity declared by the old Greek thinkers to characterize all true science marked the doctrines of the correlation of force as well as of the conservation of energy, both of them connected with this age. It was also inherent in the theory of evolution as explained by Charles Darwin in 1859, 28 years, that is, after the British Association for the first time met. Even the great Kentish physicist of our day was not entirely the first in the field with the discovery that was to transform the whole region of thought. Early in the last century De Maillet had applied the principle of the survival of the fittest to the world of human life. On the eve of the present century Charles Darwin's ancestor, Erasmus, as well as German philosophers still more famous, elaborated with more ability and knowledge the same idea, which also underlay the discussions between the French Academicians, Cuvier and St Hilaire. However the ground may have been prepared for him, so far as any single man can be said to have discovered any great idea, Charles Darwin must be accounted the author of the theory of evolution as it is now understood.