The Academia del Cimento, the Royal Society of London and the Academy of Sciences at Paris, have had a long series of imitators in the principal cities of the civilized world. The increasing extension of science and the wants of its cultivators, have led them to subdivide their pursuits and to form Societies specially devoted to each separate subject. § These learned bodies, however, are of a stationary character, located for convenience in some capital or large city. With the advance of civilization new wants arose, and Professor Oken of Munich, feeling the great advantage of periodical meetings of the cultivators of the natural sciences, organized an annual assemblage of German naturalists to be held successively in each of the great cities of Germany, thus rendering the field of friendly intercourse and of scientific observation much more easily accessible to all who felt an interest in their common object. Although the earliest meetings were small,[3] their value was soon perceived, and the cultivators of other sciences more or less connected with natural history, were gradually admitted, to the manifest advantage of all parties, until at the great meeting in 1828 at Berlin, the physical sciences themselves possessed their fair share of eminent representatives. But another important improvement had already commenced: foreigners were admitted to this German union, and amongst upwards of four hundred members, although nearly thirty were aliens in language and in country, they were welcomed with the warmest kindness by their enlightened friends. Baron Alexander Humboldt, the President of the Association, in his inaugural address proclaimed its principle in the following words:— “May those excellent persons, who, deterred neither by the perils of the sea nor of the land, have hastened to our meeting from Sweden, from Norway, from Denmark, from Holland, from England, and from Poland, point out the way to other strangers in succeeding years, so that by turns every part of Germany may enjoy the effects of scientific communication with the different nations of Europe.” At that meeting a map of Europe was published on which were conspicuously indicated those towns and countries only, which had sent representatives to this congress of intellect. On that map Austria figured an intellectual desert, not because her philosophers were less industrious in the researches of science, less acute in combining into laws the facts they had ascertained, nor in any way unworthy of sitting amongst the congregated talent of their own or of other races: but because the government of the country, more ignorant of its interest than the philosophers were of theirs, refused them passports.