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I trust I have said sufficient to indicate the future possibilities of 

 this club, and to some of us the time appears to be drawing nigh when 

 even a yet larger field of operations than any heretofore contemplated 

 may be safely entered upon — that is to say, the establishment, not of 

 an international but an inter-provincial science association, which, 

 having its headquarters here in the Ottawa Field-Naturalists' Society, 

 may, by means of its widely extended branches, gather together 

 scientific information from every quarter, with many things of great 

 value, which can be here arranged and placed on record. For, though 

 the club has no museum of its own, the museum of the Geological 

 Survey Department will always be only too glad to be the curator of 

 valuable specimens in the several kingdoms of Natural History, and 

 should be the natural receptacle for them. The present museum space 

 is none too great, but some of us as members of the Geological Survey, 

 and all of us as citizens of Ottawa, du not despair of the coming of 

 the time when, upon some one of the beautiful spots in this city, there 

 shall arise the magnificent proportions of a national museum within 

 whose walls shall be gathered together and properly arranged the large 

 and exceedingly valuable collections which are now found in the old 

 building on Sussex street, a building which it is no sacrilege to say, is 

 utterly unworthy of the treasures therein placed, exposed every day as 

 it is to the risk of destruction by fire owing to the character of its 

 surroundings. In this museum of the Geological Department are to be 

 found specimens, not only illustrative of the geological formations and 

 of the mineral wealth of the Dominion, but extensive collections in the 

 branches of ethnology, botany, ornithology, entomology, conchology, 

 etc., collections more extensive by far than the capacity of the building 

 will even now accommodate, and many of which are, as a consequence, 

 laid away in drawers and out-of-the-way places simply for the reason 

 that there is no available space for their display. These collections} 

 moreover, are increasing at a wonderfully rapid rate, as may easily be 

 imagined, from the fact that of the large field staff that go forth every 

 spring each one forwards annually whatever is found illustrative of the 

 field which he is working, so that, of sheer necessity, the erection ol a 

 new museum, or the very considerable enlargement of the present one, 



