THIRD ORDINARY MEETING. 93 
and yet exhibiting here and there those slight, often indeed inde- 
scribable, although readily appreciable, differences which inevitably 
follow the separation of a people from the parent stock cannot have 
been without interest. Interesting, too, must have been the spec- 
tacle of a race of Frenchmen, in whose past the Great Revolution 
has no place, to whom Voltaire is but a heretic, and to whom Napo- 
leon is but a name of history—a people who unite with the shrewd- 
ness, the thrift and the lightheartedness of the Frenchman of to-day 
the simple faith of the Breton peasant of the middle ages. 
As for the country itself, although the rawness unavoidable in a 
new country always produces an unpleisant effect upon those whose 
tastes have been formed in a land where the details have been 
wrought out by the labour of generations, and all unsightliness has 
been smoothed and toned away by the mellowing hand of time, yet 
there is such plain witness of wholesome strength, of plenty in the 
present and promise for the future, that the thoughtful visitor can 
well forgive faults which will be surely cured by time, and which 
time only can cure. But the exceeding loveliness of our woods and 
our waters may well atone for much that is erude and displeasing in 
our towns and settlements. Here one can praise without stint or 
qualification, if praise were not out of place among scenes where the 
fitting frame of mind is rather one of abandonment to the sweet 
influences of nature, and criticism, even in the form of the most 
appreciating commendation, seems to jar upon the ear. 
It is always interesting to know how we seem to others. The 
American wants to see himself through English spectacles, and the 
Englishman is greatly interested in reading how he looks to a 
Frenchman. So we are naturally curious to find out how we 
appeared to our late guests. But, leaving this side of the question, 
the Montreal meeting ought to have, and will have, important 
influences upon ourselves. We have been brought into personal 
contact, or at least we have looked into the faces and listened to the 
voices of many of the foremost men of our race and time in every 
department of science. Names which to most of us were before but 
names have become living flesh and blood. Thinkers and investi- 
gators with whose minds, so far as they were set forth in their 
writings, we have long been familiar we have found to have not 
only minds but bodies. Henceforth they will be to us more than 
mere vague abstractions. They will have a living human person. 
