PHILOSOPHICAL INSTITUTE OF CANTERBURY. 
First Meetine. 5th March, 1873. 
Henry John Tancred, President, in the chair. 
The President delivered the following opening 
ADDRESS. 
It is my duty, as occupying the honourable position of President of the 
Philosophical Institute of Canterbury, to which I have been elected for the 
current year, to inaugurate the present session by the delivery of an opening 
address. I can imagine that the rule which imposes upon me this duty might 
be turned to most useful account by one who had the capacity and knowledge 
required for making such an address instructive. Such an occasion as the 
present is one of the few which afford convenient opportunities for taking a 
general and comprehensive survey of the results which we have obtained, for 
giving a review of the progress made in the past, and for sketching out what 
may be achieved in the future ; for furnishing, in short, an intelligent 
summary of the advance made towards the attainment of those objects for 
which this body was established—that is to say, the cultivation of science, 
literature, and art, and the development of the industrial resources of the 
Province. This, I think, was the ideal before the minds of those who framed 
our rules, when they made the opening address of the President a necessary 
preliminary to the commencement of our work for the year. It is, however, 
an ideal which can, in the nature of things, be very seldom realized. 1 need 
hardly say that I, at least, must abandon all hope of reaching, or indeed making 
an approach to it. None indeed can, in my opinion, adequately perform such 
a task but those who are conversant with all those departments of learning and 
culture which are comprised in the list of subjects just mentioned, and could 
set forth in detail the excellences, and criticise with justice and discrimination 
the views propounded on all those subjects which have been treated of before 
this, as well as before those other societies which have become incorporated 
with the New Zealand Institute. But while professing my inability even to 
approach the standard which I have indicated, I think it not unprofitable to 
keep that standard before us, as one to be aimed at, though by doing so I may 
be rendering my own shortcomings more marked by the contrast. 
