THIRD ORDINARY MEETING. 23 



and yet exhibiting here and there those slight, often indeed inde- 

 scribable, although readily appreciable, differences which inevitably 

 follow the separation of a people from the parent stock cannot have 

 been without interest. Interesting, too, must have been the spec- 

 tacle of a race of Frenchmen, in whose past the Great Revolution 

 has no place, to whom Voltaire is but a heretic, and to whom Napo- 

 leon is but a name of history — a people who unite with the shrewd- 

 ness, the thrift and the lightheartedness of the Frenchman of to-day 

 the simple faith of the Breton peasant of the middle ages. 



As for the country itself, although the rawness unavoidable in a 

 new country always produces an unple isant effect upon those whose 

 tastes have been formed in a land where the details have been 

 wrought out by the labour of generations, and all unsightliness has 

 been smoothed and toned away by the mellowing hand of time, yet 

 there is such plain witness of wholesome strength, of plenty in the 

 present and promise for the future, that the thoughtful visitor can 

 well forgive faults which will be surely cured by time, and which 

 time only can cui'e. But the exceeding loveliness of our woods and 

 our waters may well atone for much that is crude and displeasing in 

 our towns and settlements. Here one can praise without stint or 

 qualification, if praise were not out of place among scenes where the 

 fitting frame of mind is rather one of abandonment to the sweet 

 influences of nature, and criticism, even in the form of the most 

 appreciating commendation, seems to jar upon the ear. 



It is always interesting to know how we seem to others. The 

 American wants to see himself through English spectacles, and the 

 Englishman is greatly interested in reading how he looks to a 

 Frenchman. So we are naturally curious to find out how we 

 appeared to our late guests. But, leaving this side of the question, 

 the Montreal meeting ought to have, and will have, important 

 influences upon ourselves. We have been brought into personal 

 contact, or at least we have looked into the faces and listened to the 

 voices of many of the foremost men of our race and time in every 

 department of science. Names which to most of us were before but 

 names have become living flesh and blood. Thinkers and investi- 

 gators with whose minds, so far as they were set forth in their 

 writings, we have long been familiar we have found to have not 

 only minds but bodies. Henceforth they will be to us more than 

 mere vague abstractions. They will have a living human person. 



