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the young people will avail themselves of the advantages you offer 
with your meetings in the winter, and your still more pleasant 
rambles in the summer, when we have one. No one of course 
supposes that lectures such as are delivered to your members are 
the highest or most important form of education. Nothing that 
anybody can tell you will ever be so useful as what you learn for 
yourselves. -Of all short cuts, short cuts to knowledge are the 
most delusive. There is room, I dare say, for the warning that 
Mr. Ruskin once gave when he was asked to lecture somewhere. 
‘Everybody wants to hear—nobody to read—nobody to think: to 
be excited for an hour, if possible amused: to have knowledge 
first sweetened up to make it palatable, and then kneaded into the 
smallest possible pills—and then to swallow them homceopathically 
and to be wise.” Well, we shall all agree with Mr. Ruskin that the 
thing cannot be done. He has expressed in forcible language 
what we all feel. But it is hoped—and I believe in practice it has 
been found to be the result of the work of this and similar Associ- 
ations—that they may in some measure lead people to read and 
think for themselves, by suggesting to them fresh subjects to read 
and think upon, and by bringing them into contact with other 
minds on those that have interested them before, 
Literature and Science—the two branches of study with which 
you undertake to deal—cover a vast field, over which you may 
range at will. Each will commend itself to different minds. 
Physical Science—the history of the world in which we dwell—of 
those laws of nature by which it has been brought to its present con- 
dition through countless ages, and which still we see at work before 
our eyes—the marvellous adaptation of causeand effect in the natural 
world around us—these are objects of the deepest interest to every 
thinking man. And besides their interest in the investigation of 
them, a precision is given to the thought, and an accuracy to the 
mind, which is of the utmost value in every occupation of our lives. 
But not less interesting certainly is the other subject with which 
you have to deal—the history of man himself—the history of the 
progress by which he has attained to the state we find him in to-day, 
and of the great works and deeds which have been the steps of that 
