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single branch of botany, geology , entomology, conchology, what you 
will, and work it honestly outin its every minutest detail, and you 
will soon find you will be able to give very valuable and interesting 
information. Take for example, some single grass, study its 
general and microscopical structure, its geographical distribution, 
the soil in which it flourishes best, its method of growth, flowering, 
seeding, microscopic appearance of its seed, often very beautiful, 
commercial value, &c., &c., or select, if you prefer it, some single 
flower, fern, or shell, but give it your undivided attention. Or 
keep some pet, such as a treefrog, spider, or tadpole, and observe 
closely its metamorphoses, diet, habits, and instincts, its likes and 
dislikes, character, and domestic life; or rear some particular 
butterfly or moth, such for example as the silkworm moth, watch care- 
fully its wonderful metamorphoses, its different foods, its perceptions 
of light, sound, taste, and colour, its parasites and diseases, and 
then give the society the benefit of your researches. As an ex- 
ample of what I mean, I might cite Dewitz’s exhaustive and most 
interesting treatise on ‘‘the construction and development of the 
sting of the Ant.” ‘This is the point I wish to impress on you, 
take one single subject, and ‘‘ hammer away” at it, make your- 
self thoroughly familiar with it and there will no longer be any 
difficulty about your writing a paper. Again see what Huber, 
Forel, and more recently Sir John Lubbock, has done in his re- 
searches into the life history of Ants. What marvels they relate 
of their inteiligence, their organised expeditions, their war-making, 
slave capturing, farming (if keeping milch animals and storing of 
forage can be so called), of their bridge building, architecture, 
burial processions, &c. I hope, ere long, to give you a paper on 
this subject, though, I, alas, have no time to practice whatI preach, 
and must needs avail myself of the painstaking researches of others. 
I may instance also the immense interest and importance of the 
researches of Darwin, the most painstaking and indefatigable of 
investigators into the important, though unsuspected part played 
by that lowly animal the Earthworm in modifying, levelling, and 
fertilising the surface of the earth. How it not only acts as nature’s 
plough, by bringing up to the surface the deeper particles of the 
soil, but also by so doing, spreads the germs of disease which were 
buried many a fathom deep, for I suppose you all know that those 
tiny twisted cylinders of earth, which are so numerous on grassy © 
lands, are all ‘‘ casts” of earth which have been swallowed and 
passed through the intestinal canal of the common Earthworm. 
When we turn from our own little society, and attempt to review 
the advance of science during tie last years, we find ourselves at 
one of the pauses or resting places of scientific progress. The origin 
aud progress of science has always seemed to me like that of a 
