Address of the President. 207 



fountains shall irrigate the desert, whilst a vegetation nutri- 

 tions and luxuriant, disseminated far and wide, shall have 

 attracted countless flocks and herds. An almost endless 

 network on the chart shall have interlaced the tracks of those 

 who shared in the work of adding to the world's dominions ; 

 then the wrecked mariner shall find a coast on which no more 

 the fury of the savage reigns, and monumental cairns will 

 signify then to the wanderer the spots where the never- 

 returning pioneers of civilisation fell the victims of their hero- 

 ism. An improved system of agricidture shall afford bread to 

 millions then, where now only thousands exist ; forests of 

 varied useful trees shall have been transplanted to our shores ; 

 the introduction from Flora's and from Fauna's treasures, 

 commenced in our days, supported by our anxious exertions 

 on this spot, may then enliven a much more varied industry ; 

 the trout and salmon shall traverse our streams, and game in 

 manifold variety shall roam through the forest, in which the 

 feathered tribes of many zones shall, in their melodies, have 

 added to its primeval charms. Then the steam-engine shall 

 penetrate far through the continent, and from the point at 

 which its whirling velocity must cease, the ship of the desert 

 shall in safety accomplish the remaining distances from shore 

 to shore, whilst those floating towns, called forth by the 

 enlarged conception of a Brunei, shall bend their steady 

 course across the ocean. But not alone in promoting the 

 material welfare of our adopted country shall this Institute 

 have borne its honorable share. A higher ideal of man's 

 destination in the world shall then have shown its influence. 

 Man elevated more and more by science shall have aban- 

 doned that egotism by which he but too often retrogrades. 

 No longer shall be lost that skill and that amount of physical 

 and mental energy which now are wasted in the field of war. 

 It shall, we trust, have found a higher task in realising grand 

 national projects, dictated by the requirements of a coming 

 time — fulfilling what, perhaps, in past ages, engaged the con- 

 templation of the ancients. 



In countries stretching through a climatic zone almost 

 alike to ours, arose the genius of poetry, of arts, and 

 of philosophy; from thence we trace those masterpieces 

 which, through thousaods of years to our time, have 

 been admired as the types of plastic art, of rhetorical 

 composition, and of poetical sublimity ; from thence it 

 was that Orpheus' lyre sounded in passion-subduing, ever 

 lovely harmony. Was it the influence of an eternal spring 



