CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF THE ACADEMY. 7 



Meantime, if we are deprived to-day of any protracted discourse upon the gnat, 



objects of our Association, or upon the success with which those objects have been 

 prosecuted during the hundred years which are now com] doted, we may ;tt least 

 point with satisfaction and pride to our published record. The elaborate and stately 

 volumes of our proceedings and memoirs, which have succeeded each other to the 

 number of nearly one for every three years of our existence, have furnished, and >till 

 furnish, abundant materials for all who may be inclined to pass a candid and deliber- 

 ate judgment on our sayings and doings for a century. To them we confidently 

 appeal. And let it not be forgotten, that the lack of pecuniary means, and not any 

 lack of good will or good work or good matter, has prevented more frequent and 

 more regular publications. With an adequate publication fund, such as we are now 

 striving, — ami by no means without success, — to establish, as a centennial tribute 

 to the cause of science and art, no worthy laborer in that cause will longer be 

 deprived of an opportunity to give the result of his researches to the world, and 



every successive year will have its regular and rightful volume. It is not prudent, 

 however, for us to boast ourselves of to-morrow, while this centennial fund is but 

 little more than half made up ; and, even as to the past, we may well remember the 

 warning of the wise man of Sacred Writ; "Let another praise thee, and not thine 

 own mouth ; a stranger, and not thine own lips." 



The first President of our Academy, Governor Bowdoin, whose words I have 

 an hereditary right to borrow and appropriate, — though I should ha rdly care to 

 inherit a responsibility for some of his peculiar astronomical theories and specula- 

 tions, — when he pronounced his inaugural discourse in 1780, looked forward dis- 

 tinctly to this very day and hour and occasion, and attempted to anticipate what 

 would be said of the Academy by some American historian, some American Livy or 

 Thucydides, as he said, at the close of a century. Let me read from his address, 

 as printed at the time, and from the very copy which has come down to me as an 



heirloom, a few sentences as he delivered them on the 8th of November, 1780. After 



acknowledging most gratefully the influence of the Philadelphia Society and the para- 

 mount and pre-eminent influence of Harvard University, the mother of us all, in 

 everything which pertained to the advancement of education and learning, and of 

 the arts and sciences, — he proceeds thus : 



a ' Rapt into future times,' and anticipating the history of our country, methinks 



I read in the admired pages of some American Livy or Thucydides to the following 

 effect : 



" A century is now elapsed since the commencement of American independency. 



