114 KINGSTON BOTANICAL SOCIETY. \_April, 



auspiciously inaugurated on this occasion, will have a happier 

 existence and produce more satisfactory results than a similar 

 Society which the last of the speakers intimated that he aided to 

 establish in the British metropolis. The allusion here made is to 

 the unhappy Society of London, which perished by inanition or 

 sheer famine. This miserable abortion never had a healthy exist- 

 ency, and its foster-parents appear to have been the most ineffi- 

 cient of all imaginable incapables. But de moriuis nil nisi 

 verum ; we dare not enter bonum ; this would be a sheer misap- 

 plication of the word. We trust there is a better futurity for 

 its younger and more vigorous sister of Upper Canada; but we, 

 for our part, should not, like the Professor, gratuitously state 

 that our connection with the London namesake was of a very in- 

 timate character. 



De gustibus nil disputandum. Probably the Doctor did not 

 know that the Institution which he helped to form in London 

 more than twenty-five years ago has been long reckoned among 

 the departed. 



We anticipate for the Botanical Society of Kingston a pros- 

 perous career of usefulness for many years. Our hopes are chiefly 

 founded on the comparatively unknown capabilities of the coun- 

 try. Possibly few countries on the globe, as some affectedly call 

 the earth's surface, have had their vegetable productions more 

 carefully and successfully investigated than the British Isles, 

 and still there are novelties to be recorded as well as seen ; not 

 merely new localities for rare plants, but absolute accessions to 

 the number of species. What may we not expect in a large, per- 

 haps the largest, dependency of the empire, the greater part 

 hitherto unexplored? Another ground of our confidence in the 

 success of this Society is in the characteristic energy and enter- 

 prise of colonial settlers, whether these be provincials by birth or 

 by immigration. A third and the most important element in 

 the constitution of this Society is the thorough cosmopolitan or 

 catholic nature of its objects. It appeals to the woodcutter, the 

 pearlash-maker, the cultivator, the trader, the professional man, 

 the moralist, and the theologian. 



It is a grave mistake to divorce science from humanity ; and 

 societies which confine their objects to the welfare, instruction, 

 or amelioration of their own associated members only, acquit 

 themselves of scarcely half of the functions devolving on them 

 in their combined or aggregate capacities. 



