398 Proceedings. 
found another continent.” So, also, of the artistic feelings—the love of 
harmony and the beautiful—they have a real scientific value. The popular 
collocation of art, science, and literature has more real substantial basis than 
we might be inclined at first sight to award it. In fact, like the popular 
instinct for beans and bacon, peas and pork, potatoes and beef, which Liebig 
shows to have certain real relative nutritive values, so the popular instinct 
which associates art, science, and literature unconsciously recognizes the fact 
that these have re-operative influences on each other, and that neither alone 
can well attain to perfection or develop its entire mental nutritive value 
without the other. 
I therefore desire to remind you that literary or artistic contributions 
are not foreign to the aims of our society, that, indeed, they would tend 
to increase the interest in it, and relieve it from the opprobrium of dealing 
exclusively with what, to many minds, seem dry, dull things—namely, 
facts. ` Thus, I think, contributions relative to the mythology of the native 
race ; anecdotes relative to the early settlement of the colony, or of those 
who took part in that great colonizing work; reviews of such works as 
Darwin’s * Descent of Man,” or his * Emotions,” Maudsley on * Mind” and 
* Body and Mind,” Bastian’s * Beginnings of Life,” Brassey’s “ Work and 
Wages"; or of such as Domett's * Ranolf and Amohia,” the Earl of Pembroke's 
* South Sea Bubbles," Trollope's * Australia and New Zealand," or criticisms 
on the works of our New Zealand artists, suggestions for beautifying our 
domains or for utilizing our natural products, these and many other subjects 
would, I think, come within the scope of our society's constitution, and impart 
an interest and popularity to our proceedings. Not that I would court a 
popularity which would impair, but only that which might enhance our 
usefulness. For there is a solid value in popularity when allied to usefulness, 
although by itself it is a worthless element, and, when allied to that which is 
useless, even a mischievous thing. But believing, as I do most sincerely, that 
we are in this society doing quietly and unassumingly a good work for the 
community at large, we cannot, I think, too much endeavour to render our 
work and our objects popular as well as useful. It is one of the characteristics 
of the science of the present age, that it endeavours to make itself popular— 
that is, known to, understood by, and liked by, the mass of the people. We 
find that the profoundest scientific minds think it not beneath them to 
endeavour—as Tyndall, Huxley, and others do and have done—to educate the 
minds and enlist the sympathies of the people in and in favour of the great 
truths which physical science teaches ; I say the truths which it teaches, for 
herein lies the grand power of physical science—its confidence in truth, its 
utter hatred of all that is untrue ; its unwillingness to admit as truth that 
which is only a probability ; its doubt and distrust of what is only a 
