4 THE VIOTORIAN NATURALIST. 
Nor need we fail to congratulate ourselves that, of the 
learned societies of Victoria, we have been the first to recognise 
that there are priestesses worshipping in the temple of Nature. 
Other societies have invited ladies to grace and add _ sweet- 
ness and lustre to annual gatherings, or occasionally, in 
a kind of superior patronising way, have arranged special 
evenings when more serious work was dispensed with, and curious 
or pretty things were shown or said, fitted to what was evidently 
deemed the taste of weaker intellects, but not only thus we meet 
on gala days in festive dress, but to share with us in honourable 
toil, side by side to delve in intellectual mines—to make common 
explorations into undiscovered lands of science—to strive to make 
nature give up her secrets, recognising in the fullest sense a 
common inheritance and a common right. The roll of our member- 
ship bears the names of 20 sisters of science. With the higher 
education of women an accomplished fact, with a girls’ college in 
this city distancing in matriculation honours all the boys’ 
grammar schools and colleges, I am sure of this, that whether we 
men will or will not, sooner or later we shall have to open, without 
distinction of sex, the doors of all our intellectual and scientific 
societies, and I trust that it will be our privilege, before many years 
have passed, to listen to this annual address delivered by one of 
the sisterhood of our guild. 
It is evident that this action of ours looks far beyond the mere 
admission of ladies to our meetings, and it is for this that I dwell 
upon it, for we cannot but recognise that it must play no unim- 
portant part in what may be called “ the domestication of science.” 
We may be thankful that at last, however inadequately, natural 
science forms a part of the curriculum of most of our higher 
schools. The more common phenomena of nature are, at any rate, 
investigated and explained, and principles are more or less dis- 
cussed. Collections of fauna and flora are common in our homes. 
Microscopes are found in nearly all studies. The happy home is 
certainly the intelligent home—the home where each member is 
able to add something to the common stock of thought and know- 
ledge, and, as has been said, ‘‘ where the family does not consist of 
an ill-assorted aggregation of babies, great and small, dependent 
for their amusement upon some rattle of frivolity, or the chance of 
a stranger tickling them with a fashionable straw.” The increase 
of our intelligent and happy homes has been brought about by the 
increase of our intelligent mothers and sisters. Cynics will, doubt- 
less, say that the majority of our young men care far more for 
sport than science, for cricket than for conchology, for football 
than for floriculture, for rifles than for reflection; and that 
mothers must bring up girls to suit the taste of the market, what- 
ever it may be—if the demand be for frivolity, frivolity must be 
