16 



the Canterbury (New Zealand) Acclimatisation Society, 

 and was its President when it obtained pecuniary assistance 

 for your effort to acclimatise salmon and trout in these 

 waters. I allude to these matters to show that I do not 

 come to your meetings as a mere formal duty, but 

 because I have in some degree been a fellow worker 

 before I came amongst you. And, as after a long career 

 as a colonist and politician, I look around at the growth 

 and prosperity of this group of colonies, and feel a 

 pardonable pride, as a labourer might on looking at an 

 edifice in which he has placed a stone, that I too have con- 

 tributed my mite to the work ; so when I assist at your 

 meetings or visit your museum, when I go to neighbouring 

 colonies and see what they have done and are doing for the 

 promotion of science ; or when I receive such a work as 

 the proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, containing 

 varied and valuable information and papers from such men 

 as Dr. Hector, Dr. Julius Von Haast, Captain Hutton, 

 and others, it also seems a legitimate gratification to think 

 that I have taken and am taking some little part, so far as 

 in me lies, in extending the interest which is felt in 

 scientific enquiries. And it is your Society, gentlemen, 

 that here enables me to do so. And surely the advantage 

 is very great to man that he should devote some part of 

 his time and intelligence to studies which may be either 

 profound and serious, if his time and capacity admit, or, if 

 not, then of a lighter and more recreative nature ; but 

 which, as I propose to point out before I sit down, may even 

 then be productive of results not only to himself but to the 

 cause of scientific knowledge. The advantage is great, 

 because a search for truth even in the material order, and 

 a spirit of enquiry in those things which are given us by 

 God to enquire into and exercise our intellectual faculties 

 upon, is in itself elevating, and tends to develope our 

 mental powers. Some good men seem at times to entertain 

 a latent fear that scientific studies have in themselves a 

 tendency to weaken faith in absolute and divine truth, 

 rather than to " Lead from Nature up to Nature's God ; " 

 but truth in the abstract can be but one in essence ; and 

 scientific truth when fully known must, therefore, be at 

 one with it, however speculative theories exhumed or 

 evolved in the search for scientific truth may for a time 

 seem to point to a different conclusion. Natural science 

 has advanced with gigantic strides within a century, the 



