Brougham also took a leading part in the founding of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which was established by Sir David Brewster, Sir Roderick Murchison, and many other men famous in science and in letters in 1831. It has been holding its annual meetings in all the great cities and towns of these islands ever since, and is not likely to be interrupted in the continuance of its work. The British Association was the subject of a good deal of cheap ridicule in its early days, and caricaturists, most of them long since forgotten, delighted in humorous illustrations of the oddities by which social life was to be profusely diversified when science was taught at popular meetings, and not merely men, but even women and young women, could sit in the public hall and listen to great professors discoursing on the construction of the earth and the laws which regulate the movements of the heavenly bodies. The present generation has almost completely forgotten even the fact that the British Association was once a familiar and favorite subject for the pen and pencil of satirists. "The schoolmaster is abroad" was an expression used by Brougham to illustrate the educational movement which was going on in his time, and which he did as much as any man could have done to set and to keep in motion. King William himself, we may be sure, took only a very moderate interest in all these goings {263} on, but, at all events, he did not stand in the way of the general educational movement; and indeed he gave it a kindly word of patronage and encouragement whenever it seemed a part of his State functions to sanction the progress of science by his royal recognition. [Sidenote: 1831--The press-gang]