fllimjAL ADDRESS. 
"The Point of View," 
By the President— Dr. G. MUNRO SMITH. 
I WISH to detain you a few minutes whilst I endeavour to give 
you my thoughts upon some of the different ways of observing 
and recording Natural History. 
(1) First there is the obviously supernatural method. This I 
only wish to touch upon, and that as lightly as I can. Whatever 
our faith may be, whatever we may feel as to the origin of things, 
we cannot bring this into the study of Natural History without 
great caution. The reason is pretty obvious. We notice an animal 
or plant behaving in a certain manner — we describe this, and then 
avoid explanation by saying : This is beyond us, we can give 
no reason for it ; it is the will of the Creator ; the creature is 
obeying Him and is guided by Him. This, as a statement, surely 
everyone is justified in making ; but if this is brought into Natural 
History there must necessarily be nothing further said on the 
subject. You stop observation — you appeal at once to something 
beyond our reason. Therefore we find, as we should expect, that 
the great advances in science have been made by those who in their 
investigations have used their reason and endeavoured to explain 
things in terms of human language. However far they have to 
stretch they have not tried in their explanations to stretch into the 
Infinite. 
This does not of course mean that the great naturalists have not 
been religious men. It merely means that they have kept their 
religious beliefs out of their scientific investigations. 
Here one may touch upon a somewhat kindred subject, viz. : the 
explanation of phenomena by attributing them to the work of spirits 
or beings from another w r orld, or ghosts of the departed. 
Luckily this has not held much ground of late in Natural History, 
although still used by some as a means of explaining certain 
phenomena. 
A house is said to be haunted ; visitors have water dashed in 
their faces, see lights, and hear weird sounds. Mr. Elliot 
O'Donnell and others explain these by various supernatural means 
— not to the satisfaction of the majority of scientists. The camera 
even, that very prosaic and usually truth-telling instrument, is 
made to show strange things. 
This, the supernatural method, must be condemned as a means 
of scientific explanation if we wish to do any real work in Natural 
History. 
(2) There is the picturesque and imaginative standpoint. It is 
always well that a naturalist should have an imagination, if you 
mean by that the power of putting yourself by an effort of the mind 
into the position of the animal, for example, that you are investi- 
gating, with this important proviso, that you must not start with 
the assumption that every man, woman, child, and animal, even 
every insect, thinks and feels as you do. 
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