AUCKLAND INSTITUTE. 



First Meeting : 8tli June, 1891. 



Professor F. D. Brown, President, in the chair. 



Neio Members.— T. Allen, E. S. Brookes, jun., Eev. H. S 

 Davies, W. G. Eathbone, T. 0. Williams, M.D. 

 The President delivered the anniversary address. 



Abstract. 

 The President began by regretting his want of literary genius— that 

 singular gift which enabled some men to invest the most trivial thought 

 with human interest, and to lend to the most unpromising subject the 

 charni which in ordinary hands it would never even remotely suggest. 

 Lacking as he did that divine endowment, he considered it best to 

 make no pretence about the matter, but to proceed to deal in an ordinary 

 and eommonplaco manner with their every-day existence as an Institute. 

 After referring to the foundation of the Institute, and the importance of 

 forming, as they had been doing, a scientific reference library, he went 

 on to speak of the meetings held by the society, which, he said, had 

 often been to him a source of reflection. Members frequently said that 

 they did not attend these meetings because they were much too dull for 

 them ; and this, to his mind, was the expression of a profound truth. 

 Their meetings were dull, very dull, and he feared they could not avoid 

 the dullness and so remove the reproach. In the first place, the prac- 

 tice of holding meetings of scientific societies for the purpose of reading 

 papers was one for which there was no justification but that of precedent. 

 As in many other cases, the object for which the practice was initiated 

 had become, owing to changed circumstances, of no value, and yet 

 scientific societies had continued it till the present day. In ancient 

 times the only method of publication which authors could adopt was to 

 assenible their fellow-citizens and recite to them their new productions, 

 and in the Middle Ages most new literature was conveyed by word of 

 mouth— poems were made public by the agency of minstrels and trouba- 

 dours; but now an immense amount of knowledge was placed, in the form 

 of books and newspapers, at the disposal even of the most remote 

 country resident. Even at the time of the Restoration books were 

 comparatively scarce ; and, as it was at this time that the first of the 

 now existing scientific societies, the Royal Society, was formed, there was 

 nothing more natural than that it should be considered one of their first 

 duties to meet together and make known the result of their labours. 

 Other societies, afterwards formed, followed the precedent, and thus the 

 practice of reading papers had arisen. But in these days of cheap print- 

 ing, when newspapers, magazines, and books were circulated in enor- 

 mous numbers, the old methods of making known the works of poets and 

 authors had fallen altogether into disuse, and the question then arose 

 why scientific papers should be treated in a different manner. He 

 could not see that the writers of papers derived any advantage from the 

 reading of them— the desired publication could be obtained without that ; 

 and, as to the hearers, those who were interested in the subjects would 

 probably prefer to read the papers quietly at home. In this connection 

 he urged that the interval between the reading of papers and their pub- 



