XXII ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
Committee in question:—Sir James Lemoine, B. Sulte, Dr. 8. E. 
Dawson, Mr. Deville, Honourable Pascal Poirier, John 8. Willison, 
Lt.-Colonel George T. Denison, and Sir John Bourinot, with power 
to add to their numbers. 
16. Pustic LECTURES ON THE FLORA OF CANADA. 
A suggestion has been made to the Council that the subject of the 
popular lecture for the annual meeting of 1902, may appropriately be 
“The Wild Flowers of Canada,” and that the lecturer be named by the 
Fourth Section; and that a small sum of money be granted to him for 
the preparation of the necessary illustrations and slides. Such a lecture 
would meet a public want, and could be circulated to the pecuniary 
advantage of the Society and the author throughout the Dominion. 
The subject has been neglected for many years by the Society. 
1%. PRESERVATION OF THE SITE oF LOUISBOURG. 
At the May meeting of 1900, the Council laid before the Society 
a letter from Professor Benjamin Rand, of Harvard University, who 
diected attention to the desirability of preserving for public uses the 
site of the once famous fortress of Louisbourg, in the Island of Cape 
Breton, which is in imminent danger of passing into the hands of 
commercial speculators or private individuals at the present time when 
capital and enterprise are busily engaged in that valuable section of 
the Dominion. 
It appears there is some doubt as to the accuracy of the statement 
made by Dr. Rand on the authority of Attorney-General Longley of 
Nova Scotia, that “whatever land at the old fortress not ceded to 
individuals, or occupied by squatters, belongs now to the Canadian Gov- 
ernment, by virtue of the fact that all military sites or property—the site 
of old Annapolis Fort, for instance—have been handed over in trust 
since Confederation by the Imperial authorities to the Dominion.” 
Since publishing Dr. Rand’s letter, the attention of the Council 
has been called to the fact that this very question came up for discus- 
sion in the Senate in the summer of 1895, just after the Society of 
Colonial Wars in the United States had erected a monument on the 
site of Louishourg in honour of Pepperrell and other Colonials who 
had taken the fortress in 1745. Sir Mackenzie Bowell, then Prime 
Minister, laid before the House the following official statement, and 
