26 PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 
Australia at present imports most of its scientific men, 
but it is time that it set about educating its own in greater 
numbers, and providing greater facilities and _ better- 
equipped laboratories than the existing ones. 
Our courses in science should all be of at least four years 
in leneth, and then there should be im all subjects special 
post-graduate and honour courses. Until this is done we 
can hardly hope to tram our own teachers. 
In this respect we are behind Europe and America, where 
the courses for all professional and scientific schools are 
usually from four to five years in length. 
It has been said by a writer in the North American 
Review :—“ It is fair to hold that the country that has the 
best chemists will, in the long run, be the most prosperous 
and the most powerful. It will have at the lowest cost the 
best food, the best manufactured materials, the fewest 
waste and unutilised forms of matter, the best guns, the 
strongest explosives, and the most resistant armour. 
“ Tts inhabitants will make the best use of their country’s 
resources ; they will be the most healthy, the most free 
from disease; they will oppose the least resistance to 
favourable evolution ; they will be the most thrifty and the 
least dependent upon other nations. ‘The education of the 
people in chemistry and the physical sciences is the most 
paying investment a country can make. Competition 
to-day between nations is essentially a competition in the 
sciences and application of chemistry.” 
Students require to be taught not only the principles of 
science, but also how to observe, how to use their hands, 
and to reason and think accurately, and to gather their 
information from various sources, for there are but few, if 
any, text-books so well written as to be of equal value im 
all parts. And especially should they have time and oppor- 
tunity for some original or research work in order that they 
may enlarge the borders of knowledge and contribute 
something, however small, to the common stock, for, as 
