PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. Ixxxix 



develop scientific workers eventually for the central institution and 

 thus benefit both. 



In Halifax the organization of the Halifax Botanical Club last 

 summer, under the presidency of Mr.- Waddell, is another and similar 

 sign of the times. 



Throughout the province several of our county academies or high 

 schools have now better laboratories for proper science teaching than 

 had our best colleges not many years ago ; and some of the teachers 

 are more competent than many of the good old college professors. 

 But the Government has not allowed the country to lead in this line 

 of our education ; for laboratories have just been completed for the 

 Provincial Normal School which are not equalled by those of any insti- 

 tution in the Atlantic Provinces of Canada. We should soon begin 

 to see signs of useful results from these practical beginnings. With 

 laboratory extension in the high schools we are now commencing to 

 foster manual training in the common schools ; so that it is hoped our 

 future students may have not only their minds, but their hands 

 directed in the school room to the personal and public advantages of 

 intelligent industrial labor, as well as to the at present overcrowded, 

 less important, less honorable, once-called learned professions. 



But while the great majority of people can understand the advan- 

 tage of the scientific study of the principles immediately underlying 

 the occupations which constitute the industrial force of the country, 

 they are not far-sighted enough to see why we should cultivate the 

 sciences generally the sciences which at present appear to be unpro- 

 ductive. Pardon a concluding word on this point. 



I think of science as the application of common sense to the dis- 

 covery of the facts or truth of things around us, and the arrangement 

 of this knowledge in some system which enables us to hold them in 

 mind in their true relations. Science, therefore, in so far as it ap- 

 proaches truth arid completeness in agriculture, enables us to do what 

 will give us the best crops at the least expense ; in mining to do what 

 will lead us most directly to the valuable ore and enable us to raise it 

 at the least expense ; metallurgy, to reduce the metal from the ore 

 most economically ; in medicine, to touch the hidden cause of disease 

 and remove it ; in manufacture, to improve the product or to reduce 

 the expense of production ; in transportation, to save another minute 

 of time or another cent per ton of freight ; and so on through the 



