INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 11 
“Where nature guides and virtue rules; 
Where men shall not impose for truth and sense 
The pedantry of courts and schools.” 
The poet Longfellow—in the highest characteristics of his genius as a sweet singer, a 
true link between Old and New England,—has very recently passed away from us ; and 
as I note the movement for some fitting monumental memorial of New England’s 
poet, the fact serves to recall the characteristic terms with which, in very recent years, 
Bayard Taylor thus dedicated the monument to anothér of the New England poets: Fitz- 
greene Halleck. “ We have been eighty years an organized nation ; ninety-three years an 

independent people; more than two hundred years an American race: and to-day, for the 
first time in our history, we meet to dedicate publicly, with appropriate honors, a monu- 
ment to an American poet.” 
Since then the youthful American Republic, vigorous offspring of old England, has 
attained her majority ; and at the grand centennial gathering at Philadelphia, in May, 1876, 
the poet Whittier’s graceful invocation, after craving that beneath our Western skies may 
be fulfilled “the Orient’s mission of good will,” thus closed the nation’s appeal to “ our 
father’s God ”:— 
“O! make Thou us, thro’ centuries long, 
In peace secure, and justice strong; 
Around our gift of freedom draw 
The safeguards of Thy righteous law, 
And, cast in some diviner mould, 
Let the new cycle shame the old!” 
We are this day inaugurating a movement of which it may suffice to say that, as 
yet it presents no greater significance than did the little club, by and by designated by Mr. 
Boyle “The Invisible Society,” which, in 1645 and following years—while England was 
preoccupied with her great civil war,—held its meeting at Dr. Goddart’s lodgings to con- 
sider points of philosophical interest. From thence it moved to Gresham College ; and 
there, or at Wadham Hall, Oxford, or again at the lodging of Mr. Boyle, the little coterie of 
philosophers gravely discussed, e. g., the truth of Schotter’s affirmation, “that a fish 
suspended by a thread would turn towards the wind ;” or tested by crucial experiment the 
opinion that a spider could not get out of a space enclosed within a circle of powdered 
unicorn’s horn! Yet this is the body which only seventeen years later received from the 
restored Charles II. its charter of corporation as the Royal Society ; and which includes in 
its illustrious roll of Fellows the names of Wren, Halley, Newton, Davy, and the whole 
intellectual peerage of England. 
Intellect and genius are limited neither by race nor geographical boundary. Let us 
hope and believe that in the future of our young Dominion men will arise to bear a part 
in letters and science not less worthy than those who figure on England’s golden roll. If, 
when that consummation has been achieved, our work of to-day should be reverted to ; even 
as we have recalled that little gathering of England’s scientific pioneers in Dr. Goddart’s 
parlour: the name of “ Royal Society ”—whatever may then be the political organization of 
Canada,—will recall the circumstances of its origin under the special encouragement of His 
Excellency, the Marquis of Lorne, as the representative of a Queen whose name—like 
