Auckland Institute. 397 



reference to gnicle them. Here, I think, is a department in which many of 

 our members could give valuable contributions, which ere long could be built 

 up into an authoritative and reliable geography of New Zealand. 



It must, I think, be pleasing to you, as it is to me, to observe that — 

 whether owing to the influence of our own and kindred societies or not I will 

 not venture to assert — physical science is becoming rapidly recognized as a 

 subject of even elementary education in the colony. Not only have we in the 

 Otago University a Professor of Natural Science of no mean rank, but in 

 several of the educational establishments affiliated to the New Zealand 

 University there are lecturers on chemistry, botany, and other branches of 

 physics. And it is pleasing to observe that popular lectures in some of our 

 towns on scientific subjects are attracting attention and drawing audiences. 

 These things point to the progress of the future, when the dry bones of history 

 and thrice-threshed straw of logic and philosophy will give place to the study 

 of things capable of proof — of physical science. 



But here I desire to remind you and the public that we are not merely a 

 scientific society. The terms " science" and " scientific" have become so miich 

 words of terror to those who fancy themselves outside of the pale that they 

 eithei', on the one hand, hate or fear us as antagonists, or pooh-pooh us as 

 enthusiasts. From their ranks, as well as from yours, I desire to enlist 

 contributors to our proceedings, by reminding you that we are an artistic and 

 literary, as well as a scientific, society. Science is of things we know — the 

 provable ; it deals with with what is cognizable by our senses or demonstrable 

 to them, and with the deductions that may either necessarily or probably be 

 fairly dei'ivable from these facts, observable by, or demonstrable to, our senses. 

 But man is not all sense, however much his other capacities may owe to or be 

 dependent upon his perceptive faculties. Whether his mental powers or 

 aesthetic feelings be or be not independent of his physical natiire in their 

 origin, we must i-ecognize the fact that in many the pure mental or litei-ary 

 powers, in many others the aesthetic or artistic feelings, lai^gely predominate 

 over the purely scientific faculty — the desire to know and the capacity of 

 knowing. And we must further recognize the fact that there is an influence, 

 and a very beneficial influence, exerted upon the scientific tendency by the, to 

 some extent, divergent literary and artistic tendency. As Professor Tyndall 

 has so well pointed out, there is a great scientific \ise of the imagination — 

 " that wondrous faculty, which, left to ramble uncontrolled, leads us astray 

 into a wilderness of perplexities and errors, a land of mists and shadows ; but 

 which, properly controlled by experience and reflection, becomes the noblest 

 attribute of man — the source of poetic genius, the instrument of discovery in 

 science, without the aid of which Newton would never have invented fluxions, 

 nor Davy have decomposed the earths and alkalies, nor would Columbus have 



