a 
Auckland Institute. 397 
reference to guide them. Here, I think, is a department in which many of 
our members could give valuable contributions, which ere long could be built 
up into an authoritative and reliable geography of New Zealand. 
It must, I think, be pleasing to you, as it is to me, to observe that— 
whether owing to the influence of our own and kindred societies or not I will 
not venture to assert— physical science is becoming rapidly recognized as а 
subject of even elementary education in the colony. Not only have we in the 
Otago University a Professor of Natural Science of no mean rank, but in 
several of the educational establishments affiliated to the New Zealand 
University there are lecturers on chemistry, botany, and other branches of 
physics. And it is pleasing to observe that popular lectures in some of our 
towns on scientific subjects are attracting attention and drawing audiences. 
These things point to the progress of the future, when the dry bones of history 
and thrice-threshed straw of logie and philosophy will give place to the study 
of things capable of proof—of physical science. : 
But here I desire to remind you and the public that we are not merely a 
scientifie society. The terms “science” and “ scientific” have become so much 
words of terror to those who fancy themselves outside of the pale that they 
either, on the one hand, hate or fear us as antagonists, or pooh-pooh us as 
enthusiasts. From their ranks, as well as from yours, I desire to enlist 
contributors to our proceedings, by reminding you that we are an artistic and 
literary, as well as a scientific, society. ' Science is of things we know—the 
provable ; it deals with with what is cognizable by our senses or demonstrable 
to them, and with the deductions that may either necessarily or probably be 
fairly derivable from these facts, observable by, or demonstrable to, our senses. 
But man is not all sense, however much his other capacities may owe to or be 
dependent upon his perceptive faculties. Whether his mental powers or 
esthetic feelings be or be not independent of his physical nature in their 
origin, we must recognize the fact that in many the pure mental or literary 
powers, in many others the æsthetic or artistic feelings, largely predominate 
over the purely scientific faculty — the desire to know and the capacity of 
knowing. And we must further recognize the fact that there is an influence, 
'and a very beneficial influence, exerted upon the scientifie tendency by the, to 
some extent, divergent literary and artistic tendency. As Professor Tyndall 
has so well pointed out, there is a great scientific use of the imagination— 
* that wondrous faculty, which, left to ramble uncontrolled, leads us astray 
into a wilderness of perplexities and errors, a land of mists and shadows ; but 
which, properly controlled by experience and reflection, becomes the noblest 
attribute of man—the source of poetic genius, the instrument of discovery in 
science, without the aid of which Newton would never have invented fluxions, 
nor Davy have decomposed the earths and alkalies, nor would Columbus have 
