150 Canadian Record of Science. 
honorary, on the sound principle, I presume, that the greater 
the labour the greater the honour. We have also the com- 
fortable assurance, expressed in many tangible ways and 
not as a mere sentiment, that by seeking to maintain the 
activity of the distant provinces, the Society will have the 
surest guarantee against the tendency to centralization, 
which seemed to some of us from the first to menace it, 
and the best prospect of success in carrying out its aim of 
permanent usefulness to the whole Dominion. 
“We first assembled as a society in the railway committee 
room in the parliament buildings on the 25th of May, 1882, 
and have come together annually since then, so that we are 
now engaged in our seventh year’s work. The record of 
the preceding six years is contained in our five volumes of 
proceedings and transactions, a perusal of which enables us 
to ascertain to what extent the objects set before us are 
being accomplished. 
“But from the very nature of our organization, being 
divided off into sections for facilitating work, and meeting 
in separate rooms, we are apt, as working members our- 
selves, to be but imperfectly cognizant of the full extent of 
what is actually being accomplished by the Society as a 
whole. If it be s0 among ourselves, how much more is a pau- 
city or total absence of knowledge of what we are doing 
likely to prevail among those who are merely onlookers. 
When we are here assembled together, the members of all 
sections, and favoured by the presence of friends who mani- 
fest an interest in our proceedings, I do not know that the 
hour can be spent more profitably than by adverting to 
some of the work of the past year, completed by the publi- 
cation of the fifth volume of transactions, now ready for 
distribution.” 
Dr, Lawson then adverted in detail to the several subjects 
upon which the members had contributed papers during the 
year, and, first, to the great importance of a system of obser- 
vations of tides and currents in the waters of the Dominion, 
in regard to which the Society had been co-operating with 
the British Association for the Advancement of Science, with 
