RESEARCH 



By 



His Excellency The Duke of Devonshire, K.G., Governor General 

 of Canada, Honorary President of the Royal Canadian Institute. 



His Excellency, addressing the members of the Royal Canadian Institute, 

 spoke as follows: 



Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: 



It was perhaps rather too light-heartedly that I accepted the invita- 

 tion conveyed to me some months ago by my good friend, Dr. Alexander 

 Fraser, that I should deliver the Inaugural Address this year to the Royal 

 Canadian Institute and that my subject should be "Research." I 

 confess that in the intervening months I have had some extremely 

 anxious and critical moments. (Laughter.) I was well aware of the 

 responsibility of the undertaking and my fears were more than confirmed 

 when I began to consider the lines upon which I should proceed this 

 evening. There is, however, one advantage to myself personally and 

 that is, if I had not accepted the invitation, I should, in all probability, 

 have never acquainted myself, as I have now had the opportunity of 

 doing, with the extremely valuable contributions to science which have 

 been made by the Institute during its long and distinguished career. 

 I could not help thinking that in tendering the invitation to me to speak 

 to-night some of you may have had a sort of idea that I, like my famous 

 and distinguished predecessor, may have been bottling something up, 

 (laughter) and that from somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind I 

 might have been able to produce some of the results which were produced 

 out of his inverted crucible by my own ancestor, the Honourable Henry 

 Cavendish, who, as many of you know, added much to the scientific 

 knowledge of the world, as has been testified by those who have read 

 his papers. 



Many of you, no doubt, know something of that strange and ascetic 

 individual. I do not now propose to treat of him and his peculiarities 

 at any length. You are probably familiar with the story that although 

 he started in life with emoluments, small even in those days, he found 

 himself later in possession of a large fortune, certainly through no aid 

 or work of his own as far as money-making was concerned. His bankers 

 came to him — people generally have to go to bankers, for the bankers 

 do not come to them — and informed him that he had a very substantial 

 balance in the bank and suggested that some useful investments should 



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