XVIII ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA. 
materials. But the reception which it met with from those in authority was not greatly calculated 
to encourage the repetition of such disinterested labours. 
It is in work of this kind, at once of great practical value, and yet essentially unremuncrative, if 
judged by the test of mere profitable pecuniary results, that Canada has to look for the most beneficial 
labours of its Royal Society. The history of the Geological Survey, both here and in the United 
States, is well calculated to guide us in this respect. Geology has long enjoyed the fostering care of 
the Government in both countries, though rather in its economic, than in its scientific aspect. 
Large sums have been expended, and an efficient staff employed, in surveying and mapping out the 
geological structure of the continent. The sister sciences, and especially those of mineralogy and 
chemistry, have been enlisted in its service; and paleontology has necessarily been largely elucidated 
in the combined research. But the urgent demand is ever for what are called practical results. 
True, it is to the disinterested study of pure science, to the love of abstract truth, that we owe all 
the grand, practical fruits by which science is revolutionizing the world. But Canada has been, till 
recently, sufficiently indifferent to this; and as for the United States—after doing splendid work in 
geology, ethnology, hydrography, geodesy, and meteorology, and publishing works of no less scientific 
than practical value—a commission recently appointed by Congress to investigate the operations of 
the various scientific bureaus, has draughted a bill restricting the work and publications of the 
Geological Survey, and absolutely forbidding the expenditure of any portion of the Government 
appropriation for the publication of paleontological material, or for the discussion of geological 
theories. In other words, there shall be no seed-time for science. Henceforth it must be harvest 
through all the seasons. This, I doubt not, is a mere passing phase of misapplied thrift, which will 
speedily give place to a wiser recognition of the economic value of all scientific research. But I 
refer to such experience elsewhere, rather than to any action in our own Dominion, because we may 
the more impartially estimate the probable results. The scientific value of the labours, and of the 
published results, of the United States Geological Survey has been widely recognized; and the 
restrictions suggested by the recent commission, will be felt throughout the scientific world, even 
more keenly than would the withdrawal of American specie and all its equivalents by the commercial 
world. It will not only be a great discouragement to American science, but, if persisted in, would 
enormously diminish the practical usefulness of the Survey. It is impossible to neglect pure science, 
and yet hope to reach those results which are but its latest fruitage. Paleontology, with all its 
marvellous disclosures relative to ancient life; chemistry, with its determination of the origin of 
crystalline rocks, or its wondrous spectrum analysis, revealing to us the physical structure of the 
heavens; or physics, with its more comprehensive discoveries of the correlation of forces—all alike 
present themselves to the “practical” mind as mere sports of scientific speculation, with no possible 
bearing on the economic needs, or the industrial interests of the community. What can it benefit 
the miner to learn of Tertiary vertebrates; or the farmer to be assured of the verification of the 
Hesperornis, the Ichthyornis, or other toothed birds of the Cretaceous strata of our North American 
continent? It is not indeed a matter of wonder that, to the man of “advanced vews” in political 
and social science, who claims above all things to be “practical,” it should seem a matter of equal 
indifference whether the dawn of life has been discovered in the Hozoon Canadense of our Laurentian 
rocks; or the existence of palæolithic man in America has been demonstrated by the recovery of the 
turtle-back celts in the drift of New Jersey. Nevertheless, to note only one familiar instance, the 
determination of the relative age of the strata of the Earth’s crust has been of scarcely less economic 
value in the Provinces of Quebec and Ontario, in saving the useless expenditure of many thousands 
of dollars in a vain search for coal, than in guiding the geologists of Nova Scotia in the develop- 
ment of their rich coal fields. It is the same in every department of science. Amber (jlext pov) 
furnished the first hint of latent Electricity, which perpetuates in its name the seemingly insignificant 
beginnings of that branch of science to which we now owe the telegraph, the telephone, electric 
light, the ocean cable; which have annihilated space, and outstripped time in their winged messages 
