THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 363 



It is the intention of the Council of the Canadian Institute to 

 arrange for two short courses of public lectures this winter. One of 

 these courses will be scientific, the other literary. What the Council 

 aims at is to perform somewhat the same kind of work as is clone by 

 the Royal Institution and some similar societies in London. The 

 Council asks for the cordial assistance of the friends of the Institute 

 in carrying out this scheme, not only on account of the intrinsic 

 desirability of having such courses delivered, but also because it 

 hopes to be able by means of the surplus of receipts over expenses 

 to add to the amount available for improving the museum and 

 library. 



I now purpose inviting your attention for a short time to some 

 remarks on the relation between progress in physical science and pro- 

 gress in other departments of thought and action. It is of course im- 

 possible for me to do justice to so vast a subject, in the time at my 

 disposal, nor do I flatter myself that I could say very much that is 

 new, if I had time, but I have selected this topic for a few inaugural 

 remarks, because discussion of it, however imperfect, will throw more 

 light on the real importance of societies such as the Canadian Insti- 

 tute than anything else which I could say. 



It will in the first place be advisable to obtain a clear idea as to 

 what is meant by the word science. Science originally meant 

 knowledge, but now it means something more. A man may 

 know a great deal about some groups of facts, and yet have no 

 scientific knowledge of them. A savage of three-score-and-ten who 

 has spent his life in hunting will have a great knowledge of animals, 

 but not a scientific knowledge. An accumulation of knowledge 

 becomes a science when it is brought into order by the discovery of 

 great general statements that enable us to arrange the facts, or by 

 the discovery of the laws of certain phenomena. The savage whom 

 I have just mentioned would come to have a scientific knowledge of 

 zoology, if he became able to arrange the animals he knew in certain 

 classes. In proportion as knowledge becomes systematized it becomes 

 science. 



In the next place what is meant by physical as distinguished from 

 other science 1 The physical sciences are those which deal with the 

 material universe ; mental and moral science deal with the spiritual 

 universe. The term natural science is now often used as synonymous 

 with physical science. Originally it meant something quite different 



