PRESIDENTS ADDRESS. : Ixxxix 
develop scientific workers eventually for the central institution and 
thus benefit both. 
In Halifax the organization of the Halifax Botanical Club last 
summer, under the presidency of Mr. Waddell, is another and similar 
sign of the times. 
Throughout the province several of our county academies or high 
schools have now better laboratories for proper science teaching than 
had our best colleges not many years ago; and some of the teachers 
are more competent than many of the good old college professors. 
But the Government has not allowed the country to lead in this line 
of our education ; for laboratories have just been completed for the 
Provincial Normal School which are not equalled by those of any insti- 
tution in the Atlantic Provinces of Canada. We should soon begin 
to see signs of useful results from these practical beginnings. With 
laboratory extension in the high schools we are now commencing to 
foster manual training in the common schools ; so that it is hoped our 
future students may have not only their minds, but their hands 
directed in the school room to the personal and public advantages of 
intelligent industrial labor, as well as to the at present overcrowded, 
less important, less honorable, once-called learned professions. 
But while the great majority of people can understand the advan- 
tage of the scientific study of the principles immediately underlying 
the occupations which constitute the industrial force of the country, 
they are not far-sighted enough to see why we should cultivate the 
sciences generally—the sciences which at present appear to be unpro- 
ductive. Pardon a concluding word on this point. 
T think of science as the application of common sense to the dis- 
covery of the facts or truth of things around us, and the arrangement 
of this knowledge in some system which enables us to hold them in 
mind in their true relations. Science, therefore, in so far as it ap- 
proaches truth and completeness in agriculture, enables us to do what 
will give us the best crops at the least expense ; in mining to do what 
will lead us most directly to the valuable ore and enable us to raise it 
at the least expense ; metallurgy, to reduce the metal from the ore 
most economically ; in medicine, to touch the hidden cause of disease 
and remove it ; in manufacture, to improve the product or to reduce 
the expense of production ; in transportation, to save another minute 
of time or another cent per ton of freight ; and so on through the 
