b ANNUAL MEETING. 



Rev. Canon Girdlestone, M.A. — Mr. President, ladies and gentle- 

 men : I am permitted to move the following resolution : " That the 

 Report of the Council now read be received and adopted and cir- 

 culated amongst the Members and Associates, and that Edward 

 Stanley M. Perowne, Esq., be appointed Honorary Treasurer." 



I am sure that those of us who have looked over the Report, and 

 have heard it read, must be satisfied that the Victoria Institute is 

 doing its work faithfully. We have now got to the great age of 

 36 years ! When I was a boy, I thought 36 years was a tre- 

 mendous age; but I confess that I now look on 36 as youtli- 

 ful, and I hope the day will come when this Society of 36 years 

 will have fulfilled a long series of j- ears and a happy useful exist- 

 ence, as it has done hitherto. 



On looking back over the Society's meetings, I dare say you ave 

 struck with the great variety of the .subjects. That is because 

 Nature is so various and thought is so various, and one of the 

 delightful things in connection with this Institute is, that we not 

 only listen to Papers, but we discuss them fairly as far as time 

 permits. Of course, the subjects ai'e so big and many-sided, that 

 it would be impossible to get to the bottom of any one of them ; 

 but when you read the printed discussions, I think you will see 

 that the subjects are dealt with fairly, if not fully. 



Nature is a very big book, and Ave have only turned over a few 

 pages at present. I w^as thinking the other day of the frontier 

 line lying between the known and the unknown. The luore we push 

 that frontier line back, the more we realise the known, and yet as 

 we do so, we cannot help realising that the unknown extends 

 further before us than ever. We cannot fathom it, whether we look 

 up into the sky, or down to the depths of the earth, or contem- 

 plate the minutiae of Nature by the microscope. We find the 

 wondrous steps of God all through Natui'e, and we feel, indeed, 

 that the Book of Nature is the Book of God, and the more we 

 study it the more, I think, we feel that we need not be perplexed 

 if we cannot get behind it, and cannot understand how Nature 

 came to be. The first chapter of the Bible seems to give us a 

 hint how Nature came to be ; but it is hard to get behind the laws 

 of fixity and variation, and speculation sometimes runs rather 

 rampant in the endeavour to read God in Nature. It may be that 

 speculation will some day help us further than it has, and I think 

 we cannot get on without speculation. Thei'e has always been 



