No. 8.] NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY. 471 



science from year to year, and do much to show its value as a 

 means of education and as a pioneer to wealth, industry and 

 prosperity. 



Our <rood city has now taken a more ambitious fliirht in proffer- 

 inu' its hospitality to the British Association for its meeting- of 

 188-4:. I say more ambitious, not so much in reference to the 

 standing and character of the Association itself as in reference 

 to the difficulties to be overcome. I do not assert that the 

 leading members of the British Association individually stand 

 higher than those of the American, and perhaps there is as large an 

 amount of good scientific work represented in the one society as 

 in the other. But the American Association is at our door, the 

 British is far away. Though living under a different Govern- 

 ment, American men of science scarcely at all regard this in their 

 intercourse wdth Canadians. In so far as science and literature 

 are concerned, we are practically one, and there are many things 

 in common in our circumstances and surroundings which bring 

 more closely together those who have alike been colonists in a 

 new country, than either can to the more conservative and estab- 

 lished ideas of a Mother Country. Hence it is more difficult to 

 induce the Englishman to see any propriety in transferring one 

 of his great institutions to a colony than for the American to 

 cross over an imaginary political line. Besides, the Atlantic 

 with its waves and its sea-sickness is much more than an imagin- 

 ary line, and the transportation of a large society across it, involves 

 pecuniary outlay as well as personal risk and inconvenience. We 

 need not wonder, therefore, that there should have been much 

 hesitation in accepting an invitation so novel and involving so 

 many untried contingencies. The fact that four hundred mem- 

 bers of the Association, including many of its ablest men, have 

 already siunitied their wish to attend the meeting in .Montreal, 

 should be taken by us as a testimony that the old spirit of ad- 

 venture is not dead in the Mother Country and that scientific 

 men at least appreciate what we can do in the Colonies. Let us 

 hope that the intended meetinii- may be in tlie highest degree 

 successful, and may be of the greatest service to the still infant 

 cause of science in this country. 



Death has removed several of our members in the past year. 

 Of two only do I need to say a few words. 31 r. Barnston was 

 one of our true and earnest cultivators of natural science, one of 

 those men who, banished into remote and uncultivated districts, 



