Proceedings of Royal Society of Canada. 151 
the view of pressing the matter upon the attention of the 
Home and Dominion Governments. The report on a scien- 
tific federation of the Empire had been discussed in corres- 
pondence between Sir William Dawson and Prof. Stokes, 
President of the Royal Society of London, and the matter 
of the International Geological Congress had been referred 
to Section 1V. During the past year, forty-five memoirs had 
been published by the Society, out of about seventy read. 
In his address last year he had called attention to the pre- 
ponderance—not unlooked for—of papers in the fourth sec- 
tion over those especially in the sections of French and 
of English literature. In the new volume, this discrepancy 
well nigh disappears, and in the programme for the present. 
year there is a further increase in the literary sections, so 
that, apparently, the contributions of English literature have 
doubled, and of French trebled, in the course of two years. 
On the other hand, the difficulty of reaching perfection in 
literary production, where we are dealing with progressive 
science, was illustrated by the fact that of forty papers sub- 
mitted and read last year in the section for geology and 
biology only twenty-one reached the printer’s hands. The 
first section, French literature and history, was referred to 
as the special repository for choice literature and for re- 
searches in the very earliest Canadian history, the beginnings 
of European life in Canada. The Abbé Casgrain’s elaborate 
memoir on the Acadians was specially dwelt upon as a 
valuable contribution to a striking episode that bad been so 
invested with poetic imagery that the scalpel of science was 
needed to lay the truth bare. No more fitting company 
than the members of this Society could undertake the work, 
formed as they are of compatriots representing the two 
races, using the two languages, and bound together by a 
singleness of purpose to seek the truth. In the second sece- 
tion, English literature and history, the several contribu- 
tions of Mr, Lesperance, Mr. Ganong, Sir Adams Archibald, 
Mr. Reade, Dr, Boas, Mr. Lucien Turner and Dr, George 
Dawson were spoken of in turn, and their special bearings 
indicated, either as regards results obtained or as aids in the 
