of Edinburgh, Session 1879 - 80 . 
317 
this the more that there are some topics on which I should like to 
have enlarged, and which might have been appropriate to the 
occasion, and not without interest. I hope to have an opportunity- 
hereafter of fulfilling more perfectly a duty which to-night must 
remain to a large extent unperformed. I understand that my being 
selected for this office to a certain degree is due to a desire on the 
part of the Society to vary for once the special qualifications which 
have hitherto been mainly looked for in your President, and to 
indicate a desire to revert to the literary side of the Society, as was 
contemplated in its original constitution. As far as the absence of 
any pretensions as a physicist is concerned, I no doubt may be a 
fitting representative of the desire so indicated, although the transi- 
tion from the negative to the positive is much more doubtful. But 
I am to a certain extent consoled, in the sense of my own deficiencies, 
by finding that a professional position as a lawyer was once con- 
sidered not without its recommendations in the choice of your 
members, or even in the selection of your President ; for I find that 
the first meeting of the Society was held on the 23d day of June 
1783, when the Eight Hon. Thomas Miller of Barskimming, Lord 
Justice-Clerk, was chosen President of the meeting, and it was 
resolved that the Lords of Council and Session, and the Barons of 
Exchequer in Scotland, should be invited to a participation of the 
•Society’s labour, an invitation which, I am glad to think, was largely 
responded to at the tijne, and might with mutual advantage be 
more generally acted on now. 
The theme which I should have chosen for this address, had I 
been able to cast it in anything of a systematic mould, would have 
been to consider how far it might be possible or expedient to widen 
or strengthen the literary character of this institution, and if so, 
in what direction, and towards what result this might be attempted. 
Times are greatly changed since the Society was formed, nearly a 
century ago. The prosecution of physical science, and the recording 
of its progress from month to month, must always be its chief 
development; for physical science is necessarily progressive, and 
every step taken is a step in advance. But with literature, or 
mental science, or political or social economy, or dialectics, it is not 
so ; and if the meeting and if this Society were to exchange the 
weighty authority of its scientific transactions for the ephemeral 
