ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS. 



By Christopher Rolleston, C.M.G., President. 



[Delivered to the Royal Society of N.S.W., 4 May, 1887.'] 



It was with no little diffidence that I accepted the honour 

 conferred upon me at our last Anniversary Meeting, by my 

 election to the office of President for the year, and I have to ask 

 your indulgence for my shortcomings in the fulfilment of the task 

 which that honourable position imposed upon me. I am not 

 insensible to the deficiencies which must necessarily appear in the 

 case of one whose training has hardly qualified him for the 

 discharge of the duties of the Presidential Chair, and less so for 

 his appearance before you this evening to deliver the inaugural 

 address of the Session, which before he vacates the Chair, custom 

 imposes upon your President. The design of the Society in making 

 this claim upon the occupant of the Chair is to obtain from him 

 a review of the history and progress of the Society during tli« 

 preceding Session, whilst at the same time it is expected of him 

 that he should deal with some one or more of the prominent 

 scientific advances which have formed the distinguishing features 

 of the year that has passed. With your permission I will endeavour 

 to satisfy the latter expectation first. 



Although I have no original discoveries of transcendent magnitude 

 to place before you, it has appeared to me that a cursory review 

 of the progress of scientific inquiry during the past year will be 

 found to furnish a subject of very general interest. Firstly, then 

 I will take occasion to point out the unusual activity which 

 Nature herself has exhibited in her own great laboratory. Not 

 for a long period have her experiments been on so grand and wide- 

 spread a scale. All over the face of the earth the mysterious 



