6 Presidents Address 



For this piu'pose it will be necessary to ask you to go back 

 a few 3^ears, and recall the efforts which were then made by 

 several of our officers and members, and, no doubt, with the 

 best intentions, to swell the list of members, and give the 

 Society all the appearance of a popular and flourishing 

 institution. As a consequence numbers were induced to join, 

 and were duly elected. Not a few of us at the time this was 

 going foi'ward j:)ointedout that "numbers" were not strength 

 in cases like our own. For while some joined with the main 

 view of helping us with their subscriptions, and receiving 

 copies of our Transactions as their only return, many many 

 quite mistaking, or never having had experience of the 

 working and nature of learned societies, were soon disap- 

 pointed, and fell off in their attendance at ooi' monthly 

 meetings on account of the technical nature of the papers 

 read, and the discussions on them, dry and uninteresting in 

 proportion as they are learned, which necessarily fill up the 

 greater portion of the time at our periodical meetings. At 

 one time we seemed strong from the number of members, 

 and the amount of entrance fees and subscriptions ; but ere 

 long it became evident, from the impossibility of rendering 

 owe YHQQimg^ 'popular, as the phrase goes, that the attendance 

 of our non-scientific friends was falling off. Had a record of 

 attendance been kept, it would be at this day a curious and 

 instructive document. Members of this class then became 

 loath to renew their annual subscriptions, and with the falling 

 off in numbers and money, came the cry that the Society 

 itself was doomed. Writers followed writers in the public 

 papers, seemingly to write us out of existence if possible. 

 Latterly they have given it up, whether because they 

 consider it a hopeless task to kill the Society out, or because 

 they have discovered that there is real vitality in the body, 

 now that its adventitious swathings and trappings have been 

 torn off. At different times it has been said that we derived 



