156 A PAPER—BY WM. GOSSIP. 
the Atlantic that a learned association has been introduced to a 
community under more exalted or more favourable auspices. It 
will go down to posterity as a worthy conception of the Repre- 
sentative of Her Most Gracious Majesty, her son-in-law, a noble 
Governor-General, anxious for the advancement and prosperity 
of a country whose interests were committed to his charge—a 
country than which none other on the face of the earth possesses 
in a greater degree the elewents of national greatness. With his 
name also, as its founder, must ever be identified, that of his 
royal consort, the Princess Louise, whose august presence among 
us is an evidence alike of the confidence of the Imperial Govern- 
ment in the unswerving loyalty of the Dominion, and of the 
parental reliance of the Sovereign on our zealous affection 
towards her person and government. Various, therefore, as may 
be the nationalities of which our country is composed, more em- 
phatically than ever may we now claim Great Britain as the 
Mother Country, and under the egis of her unrivalled constitu- 
tion combine to work out to their fullest fruition all those 
political, commercial and national advantages, which have so 
freely and lavishly been bestowed upon us. 
With a centralized Institution like the Royal Society, so well 
calculated to promote the advancen:ent of science, it would be a 
remissness of the duty we owe to ourselves, if the Nova Scotian 
Institute of Natural Science failed cheerfully to respond to your 
invitation to unite with you and to lend its aid to facilitate and 
promote your high objects. When, therefore, with a true liber- 
ality which did you honour, and was perhaps expected, you held 
out the right hand of fellowship, and so deigned to endorse our 
humble labours, we hailed it as a formal recognition of the 
brotherhood of science, not limited by colonial or national 
boundaries, but expansive as civilization, and wide as the world. 
We felt glad of your desire to affiliate, and Iam here to-day to 
show to you that we rejoice in your brotherhood. It may not, 
therefore, be out of place, being one of its oldest members, and 
with your permission, if I devote a few short sentences to inform 
you of our origin and history. 
The Nova Scotian Institute is placed by you among the chief 
