74. Transactious. 
from number to number, they seem to me to have generally 
embodied a vast amount of valuable observations. They seem to 
me to have been animated by the true scientific spirit, a genuine 
earnest love of truth ; and they seem to me to have maintained a 
high standard of scientific excellence. These Transactions, at 
anyrate, have rescued from sheer oblivion and neglectfulness 
many interesting memorials of our ancestors in these parts; they 
have supplied us with trustworthy charts of the distribution of 
animal and vegetable life in the south-west of Scotland ; and 
they have preserved accurate records of many interesting and 
important natural phenomena. I am quite sure the Transactions 
of this Society will bear favourable comparison with the Trans- 
actions of any similar Society in any part of the country. I 
trust that the publication of these Transactions will be long 
continued, and that they will continue to mirror for us such 
traces of life in the past as may be still discernible or discover- 
able; that they will continue to reflect hight on some of the dark 
corners of the mineral and vegetable world around us. The past 
is an ever-increasing quantity, and its landmarks and character- 
istics are perpetually crumbling away. So there is room for any 
number of students to employ themselves in accurately noting 
facts relating to the past—the immediate or the remote past— 
those facts which are the raw materials of history. On the other 
hand, the field of science is an ever-widening area, and there is a 
growing demand for labourers and for investigators to explore 
the contines of science. The work of a society like this is not 
exhausted when complete collections have been made, when all 
the species in a district have been discovered and classified. On 
the contrary, that work is only introductory to the more important 
investigation into their life habits—into the action of living 
organisms, and the effect produced on them by their environment, 
investigation which cannot fail to have important practical 
results. The splendid development which has taken place quite 
recently in bactereology—in that branch of science which is 
concerned with the very lowest forms of animal life, which has 
almost certainly given us a cure for diphtheria, which has 
certainly given us a remedy for tetanus (lock-jaw)—that splendid 
development is an illustration of the lines on which scientific 
investigation is now advancing ; lines which it is not beyond the 
members of a Society such as this to some extent to pursue. I 
feel confident that this Dumfries Society has an important part 
