xlviii PROCEEDINGS. 



Progress of the Institute since 1890. 



The Institute enters to-night upon the forty-seventh year of its 

 existence. It is, therefore, old enough to permit us to indulge in 

 the exercise of looking backward with some interest and not, I hope, 

 without profit. 



In 1890 the Nova Scotian Institute of Natural Science became 

 incorporated under the title of the "Nova Scotian Institute of 

 Science," thus proclaiming by its name what it had previously 

 acknowledged by its practice, that it took the whole domain of 

 science for its province. I shall select the date of this change as 

 setting a convenient limit to a brief retrospective glance at the work 

 of our society in the past. A survey of this period, covering 

 nearly two decades,, should furnish some help in answering the 

 question which is always of vital interest to a live organization : 

 Are we making progress ? With this in view I have collected some 

 statistics for the period mentioned showing (1) the. number and 

 length of the papers contributed each year and subsequently 

 published in the Transactions, and (2) the total number of 

 members for each year of the period. 



First, then, as regards the papers, I find that for the sixteen 

 years ending in May, 1906, the last for which complete data are 

 available, there were 153 papers contributed, averaging about 13 

 pages in length. This gives an average annual contribution of 

 rather less than 10 papers, or in the aggregate, about 131 pages. 

 To show how these contributions have been distributed over the 

 above period, I have plotted two curves, one showing the variation 

 in the aggregate number of pages presented each year and the 

 other the variation in the number of papers. It is seen that with 

 the exception of a depression in 1892-3, and again in 1896-9, the 

 number of papers keeps pretty uniformly in the neighborhood of 

 10. The curve of pages shows much greater variation. The 

 minimum is reached in the first year of the present century, the 

 maximum three years later, in 1904-5. If we divide the period 

 of sixteen years for which the curve is drawn, into two 'equal parts 

 of eight years each, it will be found that the average annual 

 contribution for the last eight years is 155 pages, or about 50 

 pages more than the average for the first eight. We must not, of 



