22 INAUGURAL ADDREBS. 



Atlantis Cottage, Nahant, 

 Massachusetts^ U.S.A., \2th September, 1891. 



My dear Sir Robert, 



I AM much pleased to learn that you are to be the 

 President of the Australasian Association for the Advance- 

 ment of Science at its next meeting in Hobart. I wish that 

 I could offer you a visit on that occasion, as I constantly 

 deplore the fact that I have never visited our great Austrahan 

 Colonies. But my age denies me this pleasure, although 

 you will see from my address that I am at present in the 

 United States. 



Australia has done a wise thing in founding a General 

 Association for the Advancement of Science, because each 

 meeting sends down healthy roots of science into the locaUty 

 visited. I feel certain that Sydney, Melbourne, and Christ- 

 church must already have felt the invigorating influences of 

 their meetings, because I have recently received excellent 

 scientific contributions from each of these capitals from old 

 pupils, who I rejoice to number among your distinguished 

 men of science. 



Australia is progressing admirably, though in a short 

 period she will look with surprise to her past dependence on 

 her riches of raw materials. England, earlier and later than 

 the reign of Queen Elizabeth, stood to Flanders in the same 

 relation that Australia stands to England. We exported 

 English wool to Flanders, and received its manufactures in 

 payment, and did not then believe that we were destined to 

 become a great manufacturing nation. The political crimes of 

 Spain, in banishing the industrious Moors and Morescoes; the 

 religious intolerance of France, in expatriating the Huguenots ; 

 and the persecution of the Protestants in the Low Countries, 

 sent us men of practical experience, who planted the roots of 

 manufactures in a soil of liberty. Vigorous as was their 

 growth, they were for a long time dependent upon empirical 

 experience, and not upon science. The improvement of 

 locomotion by sea and by land forced u])on England the 

 conviction that industrial competition was no longer one 

 dependent on the possession of raw materials or local advan- 

 tages, but had become converted into a competition of intellect 

 among the producers of national wealth. I laboured hard, 

 after the Great Exhibition of 1851, to enforce this truth among 

 the manufacturing districts. Al that time outside our Univer- 

 sities there were only two institutions of collegiate rank in 



