ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS. 9 



of elementary sanitation shall have been learned and taken to 

 heart by the masses of the people. This reproach on our vaunted 

 civilisation must ever remain whilst science teaching is regarded 

 as something dry and curious, apart and remote from the wants 

 of every day life. What a field for the establishment of the new 

 and perfect City of Hygeia — the very Civitas Dei — this Australia 

 might have afforded us. I for one cherish the hope that the 

 Federal City in this land of Australia will at least serve as the 

 model of what can be accomplished in gilding the real with the 

 ideal. Let the new city be the fruit of the full and complete 

 knowledge of sanitation and an enlightened state policy, let it 

 become the abode, figuratively and literally both of sweetness and 

 light. May politicians arise from the dusty scramble for mere 

 place and power, and labour towards the attainment of realisable 

 ideals, and all that is implied by the term ' commonwealth.' But 

 may not war and plague have their compensating after influences, 

 witness already the ready outburst of Australian patriotism, 

 and the application of modern research in dealing with maladies 

 never dreamt of, say when Newton went down from Cambridge 

 to the memorable seclusion of Woolsthorpe, to avoid the plague 

 in the year 1666. 



Let us turn our attention from South Africa to the north of 

 the Dark Continent, to that ancient land — the cradle of our science 

 — to Egypt the home and birth-place of what was then known as 

 the black art hidden science represented by the word x r //^6a. The 

 word x^eta 1 first occurs in the Lexicon of Suidas, a Greek writer 

 of the eleventh century, where it is defined as the art of preparing 

 gold and silver ; but the idea of something black, i.e., the black 

 art, obscure and hidden, is related to the Coptic or Egyptian khems, 

 signifying obscure. According to Plutarch, the derivation of 

 kemie is confirmed, namely, as I have already said, from the black 

 soil of Egypt, the native name for Egypt itself being kemie, signi- 

 fying black, the black soil of the land of Egypt. Used in con- 

 junction with the Arabic particle 'al' equivalent to our definite 



1 \y]fxa, chema. T€\vi"i tepa, the sacred art. 



