122 



ANNUAL MEETINGS 



work of the meeting was carried out in Montreal on 

 the usual lines under the presidency of Lord Rayleigh. 



It is impossible fully to assess the scientific results 

 of this or any overseas meeting of the Association. 

 Important results may spring, and have sprung, from 

 conversations at chance meetings between visiting 

 and local scientific men : such results may, more 

 probably than not, go unrecorded, though there is 

 material to afford an indication of their value in the 

 case of a later overseas meeting, that in Australia 

 (p. 138). For such intercourse the Montreal meeting 

 afforded opportunity not only between Britons and 

 Canadians, but also between both and Americans, 

 for the Council of the British Association invited the 

 standing committee and fellows of the American 

 Association ' to visit Montreal on the footing of 

 Honorary Members,' and the American Association 

 arranged its meeting at Philadelphia in 1884 on such 

 a date as would afford opportunity for members of 

 the British Association to attend it after their own 

 meeting. 



Visiting members of the British Association re- 

 turned home full of a new knowledge of the scientific 

 and economic potentialities of the Dominion ; evi- 

 dence of this appears in such unofficial publications as 

 Sir Henry Lefroy's paper before the Royal Colonial 

 Institute, Professor Boyd Dawkins' letters to the 

 Manchester Guardian, and Mr. R. D. Pullar's report 

 in the Perthshire Constitutional. On the Canadian 

 side, not only was a special handbook for the 

 Dominion issued under the editorship of Mr. S. E. 

 Dawson, but an important collection of papers by 

 Canadian and American authorities on Canadian 

 Economics, obtained at the instance of the Com- 



