XIT ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA. 



Fish Commis.sion utïoids ;i model for imitation, and the zoologists of our Society cannot do better 

 work than by insisting upon the claims of this great branch of national industry to the attention of 

 the Government. 



Our forests are perhaps even of greater value to the Dominion than the fisheries. For manj' 

 years they have been a great source of wealth to the country, and, during all these j-ears, the lumberer 

 has been wasting them. In other lauds, great time and attention are devoted to forestry, and the 

 modes of planting, pruning and protecting trees are cai'cfully .studied, but on thi.s continent the subject 

 has hitherto been much neglected. The early settlers, who looked upon the forest as their enemy, and 

 as the hiding place of savage beasts and more savage men, thought only of its destruction. Now, with 

 the disappearance of wood, so needful as a fuel in our rigorous climate, we arc beginning to prize the 

 forests and to lament their premature disaj^pearance. The establishment of botanic gardens and 

 schools of forestry, in which the various problems, connected alike with agriculture and with the 

 growth and preservation of trees for timber and for fuel, may be carefully investigated, are subjects 

 near to every one who desires the j)rosperity of the counti-y, and should not be lost sight by the mem- 

 bers of this Society. 



In conclusion, the President insisted upon the many reasons for congratulation on the success 

 which had attended the past three years of the Society's existence, and for looking forward to a usefu' 

 and a brilliant future. 



The Vice-President, Dr. Daniel AYilson was next called upon by His Excellency. He observed 

 that he thought it -was fortunate for Canada that it had taken the step of organizing this Society before 

 the meeting of the British Association on Canadian soil, thereby testifying that our recognition of 

 the value of abstract science was alike heaity and spontaneous. There was no lack of appreciation of 

 the worth of such contributionsof science as the telegraph and the ocean cable, which, as it were, anni- 

 hilate time and .space, and bridge over for us the wide Atlantic; of the telephone, with all its mar- 

 vellous facilities and still grander possibilities of inter-communication; or of electric light, by which 

 at will we turn night into day. Our legislature had, for many years, libei\ally subsidized the Geolo- 

 gical Survey, to find for us coal and copper, gold, silver, lead and other minerals, and to map out tor 

 us in economic detail the phj-sical resources of our vast domain. But this recognition of science, 

 for its own sake, was a grand step in advance. It furnished the best evidence that Canada had passed 

 beyond the mere elementary stage of nai-row utilitarianism, and had awakened to some just sense of 

 the value of that self-denying search for absti'act ti-uth in all its scientific relations, without which 

 such practical results as those already I'cferred to could no moi-e be secured than the autumn harvest 

 without the labours of the seed time. 



After the comprehensive summary of the efforts and achievements of the jjast year, which they 

 had just listened to from their President, it would be a work of supererogation for him to detain His 

 Excellency and the members with further remarks, were it not that one subject had still a special 

 claim on their attention. Dr. Storry Hunt had, not unnaturally, given jirominence to physical science ; 

 but not only did the Society embi'ace in a special manner the literature of tvvo of the most cultivated 

 languages of Europe, but along with this it included archa^ologj-, ethnology and comparative philo- 

 logy ; and, in the last two, encouragement was given to researches into the races and languages of 

 this continent, and especially of our Dominion, to which too much impoi'tance could not be attached. 

 The races of our great Northwest are vanishing. Now or never the materials must be collected 

 from which to deduce scientific results. We can only preserve any remnant of our aborigines by a 

 process of civilization and absorption which involves the loss of language, of native ai-t, and all else 

 that is of value to the historian and the ethnologist. To this, therefore, it is indispensable that im- 

 mediate attention be given ; for it is work that must be done now or never. 



Again, the language of France, the old France of the Eegency and long before it, as brought from 

 Normandy and Brittany, survives in the Province of Qnclioc in modified foi-ms replete with interest to 



