1898-99. | FIFTIETH YEAR OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 653 
one of your members and a Professor in this building has lately well 
said, even the very poetry of this generation : so that the newest and 
the greatest living poet of our Empire is not merely the poet of Empire 
but the poet of Science. 
And for this very reason, Sir, I, as the representative of that learning 
which was once “the new” and now is very old, I had almost said effete; 
as the representative of the dead languages, as the representative of that 
one among all the sister institutions here gathered to-night, which may 
specially be called “the silent sister,” in the busy modern world; the 
sister who sits faded and humble in shabby attire, struggling to revive 
the ancient embers of a dying fire, another Cinderella but without a 
fairy Prince; as the representative of that side of University life of 
which the poet and critic spoke, when he described Universities as the 
homes of lost causes and impossible loyalties; as the representative of 
all this I can with the better grace, with the more complete impartiality, 
congratulate the Canadian Institute on its success; you have surmounted 
Sir, the initial difficulties which beset even the career of Science; you 
have outlived the years of leanness which once threatened the life of 
the Institute, even as they threatened the life of the young and Scientific 
University of Victoria, in the City of Manchester, where, twenty years 
after the foundation of Owens’ College its Governors met to consider 
whether they should close its doors; you also have never closed your 
doors, and we congratulate you on the scientific work and scientific 
hopes, fifty years of which are gathered here to-night. 
Sir, in the ancient civilization of Greece there was once a great and 
famous organization, originally founded by the supreme passions which 
stir men’s natures, religious and political ideals ; and yet that organiza- 
tion, as time went on, as ancient religion flickered out, and ancient polit- 
ical systems ceased to be, dwindled at last in Nature’s irony into only a 
literary and scientific club. 
It is otherwise with Science to-day. That which begins in the 
student’s chamber as the dream of the explorer, the vision of the soli- 
tary thinker, the hope of the savan, is to-morrow transferred to the 
world of action and is in everybody’s mouth. The triumphs of the 
electrician, the physicist, or the mechanician, the discoveries of the 
student, are to-morrow the concern of practical men, are embodied in 
our workshops and factories, are translated into realities in our com- 
merce, find even their place amidst the sternest and most practical of 
all experience upon the soldier’s battle-field. 
