PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 



ation, as well as in statics and dynamics. Later, it was 

 due solely to the conceptions of Joseph Black, chemist, 

 physician, and professor, in Glasgow and Edinburgh, as to 

 the action of pressure on boiling point, and absorption of 

 heat by vapour, that James Watt was enabled to effect a 

 revolution in the construction of the steam engine. 



Pambour, Eaton Hodgkinson, Clerk Maxwell, Kelvin, 

 and Lodge, with many others, have more recently con- 

 tributed to the achievements of the engineer. 



In the last half of the century just passed, however, the 

 tendency of the education of the engineer being undertaken 

 by technical institutions, rather than by the older pupilage 

 system, has, so to say, married engineering to science. It 

 has been truly a marriage at a mature age, but now that 

 the parties to it are old enough to know their own minds, 

 surely it is a love match, which is being blessed with an 

 ample progeny. 



The Odyssey of Homer is considered by some authorities 

 to have been written solely as an allegory of man's life 

 through this world of temptations and dangers, and of his 

 protection from them by the heavenly powers. The tale 

 of the great hero Odysseus, in his temptations by Oirce and 

 Calypso, his struggles with the monster Polyphemus, and 

 the loosening of the windbag of iEolus, but ever helped by 

 the divine influence of the goddess of Wisdom, to the arms 

 of the faithful Penelope, personifies the life of every man, 

 through his mortal existence here on earth. As to the 

 windbag, we have in the present day, unlettered and small 

 knowing souls, as Shakespeare calls them, who loosen on 

 us many windbags, which waste our energies for real 

 advancement, as the reporting columns of our newspapers 

 shew, and who, one would almost think, were within the 

 prophetic insight of old Homer when he composed the 

 allegory. May we not take this wonderful story of old, 



