Ae eeeN DT x. 

Report BY Wm. Gossip, Esq., DELEGATE TO THE ROYAL SOCIETY 
AT Ottawa, May, 1883. 
(Read Nov. 12, 1883.) 
AT the Quarterly Ordinary Meeting in April, 1883, of the Nova 
Scotian Institute of Natural Science, I was chosen a delegate to 
represent the Institute at the meeting of the Royal Society of 
Canada, with which we had become affiliated, and which was 
appointed to be held at Ottawa in the following May. It wasa 
pleasure to me to be the recipient of, and to accept the honor 
and responsibility; and as a natural sequence it appears that 
I am expected to furnish some account thereof, so far as my 
observation extended. I should very much have wished, that 
what I had to say were of far greater interest: and the only 
eredit I take in the matter is, that it may help to wile away the 
time in the absence of important papers on subjects of a more 
scientific nature. 
It is certainly a long journey between Halifax, the capital of 
Nova Scotia, and Ottawa, the Capital of the Dominion, our 
Institute being the most remote eastwardly of the affiliated 
Societies. I had never visited the Metropolis, and this was no 
doubt a chief inducement to undertake it, as it afforded a favor- 
able opportunity of doing the nine hundred and odd miles that 
intervened. To encourage hesitating travellers, | may state that 
the journey proved very pleasant at this season, the weather 
generally delightful, and growing gradually into comfortable 
summer warmth ; and I may also mention, that so far as railway 
mishaps are concerned, we met with none, and that nothing 
