THE PRESIDEN? S ADDRESS. 115 
crinoids and foraminifera, ntombed in rocky sepulchres, grander and 
more lasting than the pyramids and catacombs of the Pharaohs? In 
this, too, Canada is doing her appointed share in the world’s search 
into the hidden truths of that book of nature, which is no less a 
divine revelation to us than the sacred volume of revealed moral 
truth : no less divine, though of inferior moment in the bearings of 
the truths it discloses, as revealing to us the Creator travelling in 
the greatness of his might through the silences of that infinite which 
lies behind us. In this, Canada claims to take her part among the 
world’s thinkers. She will hew her lumber, raise her wheat, mine 
her copper, lead the tracks of her railways ever westward, conquer- 
ing the savage wilderness, and make the wilds of our vast pine forests 
the happy settlements of a free, industrious, and progressive people ; 
but she aspires to something more than to be the mere lumberer and 
wheat-grower of the world; and in so far as Canada does so, her 
material progress will not be the less, but greatly the more, for the 
‘intellectual vigor developed in thus claiming her place in that grand 
intellectual arena to which only the world’s most gifted races find 
admission. 
I might indeed dwell here, with justice, on the practical results of 
science; on the certainty that the mastery of the laws of nature 
increase the power of man; on the wondrous consequences that 
have followed from its least heeded beginnings ; on the rubbed am- 
ber, #Aexrpov,—the electron of the Greeks—lifting straws: or the 
convulsions of the dead frog in the kitchen of the famed Bolognese 
Professor, Galvani: from whence we trace all our magnetical obser- 
yatories, our new determinations of longitudes, our electric telegraphs, 
and the world-embracing project of our Atlantic cable. Or, again, 
on Newton’s Apple; Jansen, the Dutch Optician’s toy glasses; 
Watt’s tea-kettle; or—apter for our present purpose,—Franklin’s 
old key, which served him, with a silk-thread, sealing-wax, and a 
sheet of paper, to discover the identity of lightning and electricity : 
these, or a thousand other germs of thought, insignificant, and barren 
as the sand-grains sown by the east wind, when presented to the dull 
common eye; but pregnant as the thousand-fold seed which the 
Master Sower let fall into good ground, when they drop like the dews 
of summer on the fostering intellect of ripened genius. But here at 
least, such a defence of the sciences is unneeded. In the Canadian 
Institute it may be presumed that we pursue science from the pure 
