10 REPORT— 1878. 



the one hand knowledge is distinct from opinion, from feeling, and from 

 all other modes of subjective impression, still the limits of knowledge are 

 at all times expanding, and the boundaries of the known and the unknown 

 are never rigid or permanently fixed. That which in time past or present 

 has belonged to one category may in time future belong to the other. 

 Our ignorance consists partly in ignorance of actual facts, and partly also 

 in ignorance of the possible range of ascertainable fact. If we could lay 

 down beforehand precise limits of possible knowledge, the problem of 

 Physical Science would be already half solved. But the question to which 

 the scientific explorer has often to address himself is not merely whether 

 he is able to solve this or that problem, but whether he can so far unravel 

 the tangled threads of the matter with which he has to deal as to weave 

 them into a definite problem at all. He is not like a candidate at an 

 examination with a precise set of questions placed before him ; he must 

 first himself act the part of the examiner and select questions from the 

 repertory of nature, and upon them found others, which in some sense 

 are capable of definite solution. If his eye seem dim, he must look stead- 

 fastly and with hope into the misty vision, until the very clouds wreath 

 themselves into definite forms. If his ear seem dull, he must listen 

 patiently and with sympathetic trust to the intricate whisperings of 

 nature, — the goddess, as she has been called, of a hundred voices — until 

 here and there he can pick out a few simple notes to which his own 

 powers can resound. If, then, at a moment when he finds himself placed 

 on a pinnacle from which he is called upon to take a perspective survey 

 of the range of science, and to tell us what he can see from his vantage 

 ground ; if, at such a moment, after straining his gaze to the very verge 

 of the horizon, and after describing the most distant of well-defined 

 objects, he should give utterance also to some of the subjective impres- 

 sions which he is conscious of receiving from regions beyond ; if he 

 should depict possibilities which seem opening to his view ; if he 

 should explain why he thinks this a mere blind alley and that an open 

 path ; then the fault and the loss would be alike ours if we refused to 

 listen calmly, and temperately to form our own judgment on what we 

 hear ; then assuredly it is we who would be committing the error of con- 

 founding matters of fact and matters of opinion if we failed to discriminate 

 between the various elements contained in such a discourse, and assumed 

 that they had all been put on the same footing. 



But to whatever decision we may each come on these controverted 

 points, one thing appears clear from a retrospect of past experience, viz., 

 that first or last, either at the outset in his choice of subject or in the 

 conclusions ultimately drawn therefrom, the President, according to his 

 own account at least, finds himself on every occasion in a position of 

 " exceptional or more than usual difficulty." And your present repre- 

 sentative, like his predecessors, feels himself this moment in a similar 

 predicament. The reason which he now offers is that the branch of 



