8 INAUGURAL ADDKESS. 



chiefly the result of State surveys, aided materially by the 

 zeal o£ members of the New Zealand Institute, and of late 

 years by an increasing band of young students, who are 

 fast coming to the front under the careful science training 

 that is afforded by our University colleges. 



In the epoch of their development the Australasian Colo- 

 nies have been singularly fortunate. The period that applies 

 to New Zealand is contemporaneous with the reign of Her 

 Majesty Queen Victoria, which has been signalised by enor- 

 mous strides in science. It has been a period of gathering 

 into working form immense stores of previously-acquired ob- 

 servation and experiment, and a period marked by the escape 

 of the scientific mind from the trammels of superstition and 

 hazy speculation regarding what may be termed common 

 things. Laborious work had been done and many grand 

 generalisations had been formerly arrived at in physical 

 science ; but in the work of bringing things to the test 

 of actual experiment investigators were still bound by im- 

 perfect and feeble hypotheses and supposed natural bar- 

 riers among the sciences. But science is now established 

 as one and indivisible, and such subdivisions as physics, 

 chemistry, biology, are only adopted for the convenience of 

 study. The methods are the same in all, and their common 

 object is the discovery of the great laws of order under 

 which this universe has been evoked by the Supreme Power. 



The great fundamental advance during the last fifty 

 years has been the achievement of far-reaching generalisa- 

 tions, which have provided the scientific worker Avith power- 

 ful weapons of research. Thus, the modern " atomic 

 theory," with its ncAv and clearer conceptions of the inti- 

 mate nature of the elements and their compounds that 

 constitute the earth and all that it supports, has given rise 

 to a new chemistry in which the synthetical or building-up 

 method of investigation is already working marvels in its 

 application to manufactures. It is, moreover, creating a 

 growing belief that all matter is one, and reviving the old 

 idea that the inorganic elementary units are either simple 

 or aggregated centres of motion specialised in a homo- 

 geneous medium, and that these units have been con- 



