32 INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 



recognition by societies of like character with our own, both at 

 home and abroad. The knowledge of this recognition cannot but 

 stimulate us to greater exertion and progress, in the course on which 

 we have entered. 



Some of the bodies which have honored us with communications 

 have been constituted for a very much longer time than we have 

 been. They have had great experience and have enjoyed much 

 success. The reports of their transactions, with which they have 

 favored us, show their work to have been of a much higher order than 

 it has been in our power to attempt as yet. Among places abroad, 

 whence we have been favored in the way I have mentioned, I may- 

 particularise Norway, a country of great interest to one of the two 

 kingdoms of which Great Britain is composed, because of nearness 

 of neighborhood and of kindred, and similarity of conditions, physical 

 and political. Norway is not the most populous country in Europe, 

 and with respect to it our ruling impressions are of cold and barren- 

 ness, but the people are able and resolute in the maintenance of their 

 liberty and their national institutions, and, if their climate is cold and 

 barren, they themselves are neither the one nor the other, in any sense. 

 In the reports from thence with which we are favored, we have 

 proofs of their intellectual fruitfulness, which are tilted to cause us to 

 bestir ourselves, if we seek to get into line with sister societies such 

 as exist in that and other lands. 



But though I thus exhort our literary, philosophic and scientific 

 friends to look to their laurels, I do not propose in my own remarks 

 which are to follow, to make any attempts in literature or philosophy. 

 I shall make a only very humble attempt at what I shall call science, in 

 order that my paper and myself may have the right to appear before 

 you. I shall ask your attention for a few minutes to a prosaic, but 

 most practical subject, that of our "health." 



There are a few of us here present, who have not learned to 

 value health. Of those around me the greater number have had ex- 

 perience enough of life and its changes to enable them to appreciate 

 very thoroughly that change which consists in the loss of health. 

 Few there are who have not suffered from that loss in their own per- 

 sons, or in those of their near friends, and no doubt there are many 

 of them who are aware that by a little knowledge of disease and its 

 causes, many a fatal illness might have been prevented. This subject 



