12 ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS. 



avocations 1 For may not any individual possessed even of such 

 elementary knowledge be the means of preventing in one or more 



instances the growth of germs of some disease winch perhaps, 

 originating in the stagnant water of a small house-drain, would 

 spread through a town with such direful e3ect as we sometimes see 

 to be the case, especially in reference to typhoid. Enlarged 

 diagrams illustrative of the forms and rapid mode of growth of some 

 of the dreaded organisms, explained with the aid of a microscope 

 in a simple manner appropriate to the reason of a child, would 

 afford lessons never to be forgotten, and perhaps, in many cases, 

 would awaken more interest or wonder than that created by fairy 

 tales (which I acknowledge has in itself a special value) and with 

 the manifest advantage that the child afterwards realizes that his 

 imagination has not been deceived, and that his reasoning powers 

 have been strengthened for exercise in fields of usefulness for 

 himself and for his fellows. We know that children often 

 communicate to their parents at home what they learn at school, 

 and if such elementary sanitary knowledge were more taught and 

 disseminated, especially to the children of the uneducated classes, 

 our Public schools would less frequently than now be closed, 

 because they become the means, owing chiefly to the ignorance of 

 the parents, of spreading infectious diseases amongst the children 

 In some less useful though, perhaps, more interesting branches of 

 science might elementary teaching be also given. It is not, 

 however, my present purpose to refer further to science-teaching, 

 but to the main scope of the work of this Society — science- 

 harvesting, the ingathering of fruit cultivated in the fields of 

 knowledge. 



The object of the Society, as stated in the Rules, is one of very 

 wide range, viz. : "To receive original papers on Science, Art, 

 Literature, and Philosophy, and especially on such subjects as 

 tend to develop the resources of Australia, and to illustrate its 

 Natural History Productions." This plan of work has been well 

 -conceived, for commerce which is, so to speak, the physical 

 strength of a nation, depends upon the development of the 



