464 ADDRESS DELIVERED AT A MEETING 



expected that they will communicate to us the fruits of those 

 toils, if they should he long withheld from puhlic view. Already 

 there are indications that researches, which should naturally find 

 their place in our Transactions, are about to reach the public 

 through other channels. I trust that this evil may be stayed. 

 The injury that it inflicts is not merely the loss of so much that 

 should add to our credit and our character as a public body, but 

 this very loss itself reacts upon, and augments the evil from which 

 it has sprung. Nor is it necessary for me to urge, that publica- 

 tion is the first, the main and essential duty of such a body as 

 ours. No matter what may be the interest of our meetings, no 

 matter how far the study of Science, Literature, or Antiquities, 

 may be aided by our library and our museum, it is by our 

 published works that we shall be judged, and by which we must 

 stand or fall. I have only to add, that your Council are duly 

 impressed with this feeling ; and that your Officers are at present 

 engaged in the consideration of some measures which promise 

 to give not only a speedy, but also an increased publicity to our 

 Proceedings. 



Another instrument of progress, to whose efficacy I will advert, 

 and which this Academy may, I think, effectively wield, is the 

 directing power which it may reasonably assume, in pointing out 

 to its members problems of local interest remaining to be solved, 

 and encouraging them to the task by the proposal of Honorary 

 Rewards. The practice of proposing subjects for investigation, 

 and of honouring them by prizes, has existed, you must be aware, 

 from the very origin of the Academy ; and it has tended to elicit 

 researches of considerable interest and value. Some years since, 

 indeed, it was generally felt that the system had failed; and that 

 opinion (in which at the time I shared) led to an alteration in the 

 system of Honorary Rewards, with which you are of course ac- 

 quainted. It may be doubted, however, whether this failure was 

 the necessary result of the system itself, and not rather of the 

 nature of some of the topics selected and proposed. It must be 

 manifest, I think, that no encouragement which such a Society 

 as this can bestow will be likely to stimulate a man of genius 

 to the investigation of an abstruse question, to which he feels 

 no predisposing movement, that no reward can usurp the place 

 of inspiration itself. But there are problems of a different stamp, 

 whose solutions may be expected as the certain result of well- 



