THE PRESIDENTS ADDRESS. 111 
The Provincial Geological Survey continues its valuable labours, 
under the guidance of Sir William Logan, whose former occupancy of 
this chair reflects an honor on any one who succeeds to it ; and during 
the past year two of the illustrated decades of Canadian Organic 
Remains have been issued, in a style peculiarly creditable to our young 
Province. The head quarters of the Geological Survey and its Pro- 
vincial Museum, are established in the commercial capital of Lower 
Canada; while in Toronto, the Provincial Magnetic Observatory, 
originated under your first President, Captain Lefroy, continues in full 
activity, and the data of another year’s magnetic and meteorological 
phenomena have been recorded by its director, Professor Kingston, 
for future publication. 
Perhaps no more striking illustrations of the changes which a cen- 
tury has wrought on this Province could be selected, than are embodied 
in those two evidences of Anglo-Canadian enterprise and intellectual 
activity. That on the old trail of the Missassauga and the Huron, the 
wild forest and the swamp have given way to the busy marts and the 
crowded thoroughfares of an industrious and thriving city, is no trifling 
evidence of the healthful revolution which has been effected ; and this 
change has all been wrought by the busy hands and the hardy endur- 
ance of the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic supplanters of the Aboriginal 
Tndians,—by those to whom, as colonists, the well-known language 
_ of Burke is still applicable : «« A people but in the gristle, and not yet 
hardened into the bone of manhood.” 
That in this essentially practical age a race so thoroughly energetic 
and progressive as that from which the colonists of Canada have 
sprung, should clear the forest, drainthe swamps, pave the roads, and 
rear costly marts and dwellings where so recently the rude birch-bark 
wigwam stood, is no slight triumph. Yet we scarcely need to be 
reminded that such material triumphs are neither the highest nor the 
most enduring monuments of a nation’s progress. That great city 
Nineveh, and the mighty Babylon, that once queened it so proudly 
on the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates, are now but heaps of 
reedy clay, above which the wandering Arab feeds his flocks; while 
Athens lives for us still, far more by the pen of Sophocles and Socra- 
tes, Plato and Aristotle, than by the marbles of Phidias, or the 
columns of Callicrates and Ictinus. Even so, among the commercial 
marts and capitals of the civilized world, both Toronto and Montreal 
must still be content to claim a very secondary place; while instheir 
relation to those two great departments of scientific labour on which, 
