ROYAL SOCIETY. 
APRIL, 1893. 
The first monthly meeting of the 1893 session of the Royal Society of 
Tasmania was held on Monday, Aprill0. The Acting-President (Sir 
Lambert Dobson) took the chair. There was a moderate attendance of 
ladies and members. Mr. E. D. Peters, M.D., M.E.C., was elected a 
corresponding member, and Messrs, A. MaeAulay, M.A., W. Jethro 
Brown, M.A., LL.D., and W. H. Williams, M.A., were elected Fellows, 
WELCOME TO THE ACTING PRESIDENT, 
Mr. JAMES BARNARD, a Vice-President, said that before commencing 
proceedings he thought it was only becoming to acknowledge and 
welcome the presence of Sir Lambert Dobson in his changed position. 
On behalf of the Council and Fellows he offered the Administrater 
hearty congratulations on his assumption of the Presidential chair 
officially as Governor of the colony for the time being. 
Sir Lampert Dosgson thanked Mr. Barnard for the very kind way in 
which he had welcomed him there officially. He was not unknown 
unofficially within those walls—(hear, hear)—but certainly he had never 
presided there at a meeting of the Royal Society in the capacity of 
Administrator of the colony. It was a very great privilege to be there 
as president for the time being. On the occasion of the opening of the 
first meeting of a new session he knew it had been usual to deliver a 
presidential opening address. But Sir Robert Hamilton, previous to 
his departure, prepared so excellent an address, that almost everything 
he could say in an inaugural address had been exhausted. Still, there 
were one or two words he would like to utter. The Royal Society had 
no doubt done a great deal of good work, and he hoped would do good 
work in the future. (Hear, hear.) He took it that science was really 
- divided into two parts ; metaphysical and physical. The metaphysical 
drew largely from speculation. In the present century we liked results, 
and he thought, therefore, that the physical branch was that which really 
became popular, and likely to monopolise a very large proportion of the 
attention of the members of the Society. In the metaphysical we 
knew that we probed a theory, had large speculations, found that they 
had been speculated om before and abandoned for some other theory, 
and then came back to the starting point. Butin physical science every 
particle of knowledge gained was pure knowledge. Everything gained 
by observation or calculation was matter added to the general knowledge 
of men, and could never be lost. It was in this branch of science that 
he believed their work really lay. Heretofore, there was no doubt, both 
with respect to our fauna and flora, we had had a large amount of 
work to do to discover the peculiarities and principal features of these 
of our natural products, But naturally that field must become 
exhausted, and we must look further afield. Here we had one very 
grand field, which really, he thought, could never be exhausted—the 
geology of the colony. (Hear, hear.) Wehad its great history written 
on the rocks, and as it had taken ages to compile that history, so he 
believed it would take ages to decipher and read it aright. This line 
offered a large amount of work for the Society to undertake, and from 
what he noticed of the papers for that meeting it was one to which 
attention was being largely directed. The advantage of the little know- 
