﻿356 Proceedings 



Second Meeting. 1st Jiily^ 1871. 



W. T. L. Travel's, F.L.S., President, in the chair. 



New memhers. — F. Allen, J. W. Buller, F. A. Cooper, Charles Hulke, 

 M. Mosley, H. E. Tuckey, B.A., Captain F. W. Hutton, F.G.S. 

 The President then delivered the following 



ADDEESS. 



Gentlemen, — 



It is my duty as President of this Society for the current year to commence 

 the proceedings of the session by a few remarks. I propose, in doing so, in 

 the first place to take a retrosj)ective glance at the labours of the Society for 

 the past year, and in the next place to make some suggestions as to the dii-ec- 

 tion which its inquiries ought to take for the future. Any retrospective view, 

 however, which I may be able to lay before you of the labours of the past 

 year must, necessarily, be very imperfect, and must amount at best to a 

 relation of matters, with which the majority of members may be as well 

 acquainted as myself \ but, nevertheless, it is often convenient to ascertain, 

 by summarizing results, whether a Society professing to be a scientific one is 

 properly discharging its functions. It is, in efiect, our duty to determine to 

 what extent we have added to the cumulative power of scientific thought, to 

 what extent we have jirovided material calculated to aid ourselves and others 

 in the progress of scientific enquiry. It has been well observed, in relation 

 to recurrent periods in the progress of scientific investigation, that divisions of 

 time are altogether artificial as compared with the activities of the human 

 mind ] and, therefore, in sketching the history of science during any such 

 past interval as that to which I am referring, we are, as it were, only cutting 

 out a fragment from the woof of a continuoiis fabri-c, which, whilst it may 

 indicate the nature of the pattern, affords no definite hints as to its beginning 

 or its end. Like my predecessor in this chair, I have found that the laboui's 

 of this Society are so far bound up with those of other Societies affiliated to 

 the New Zealand Institute, that I shall be compelled, even in the brief review 

 I am about to lay before you, to refer to their proceedings as well as to our 

 own, a course by no means improper, seeing that, after all, each society is but 

 one of a series of grafts upon the ti-ee of scientific knowledge which has been 

 planted in this colony, and that the fruit which each of them bears must be 

 good or indifferent, in proportion to the vigour of the common stock. 



In looking over the results of the labours of the various societies during 

 the past year, I find them divided by the learned editor of the Transactions of 

 the Institute into five separate classes, under the several heads of Zoology, 

 Botany, Chemistry, Geology, and Miscellaneous, and I find that in each of 



