45 
as introductory to subjects which come within the province of 
the Society. Due notice of the titles of these papers, and of 
the dates upon which they are proposed to be read, will bo 
given. The first will be “ A Sketch of the Existing Relations 
between Science and Scripture/ 3 by George Warington, Esq., 
Member of Council, and will be read on the evening of the 
4th of June. Ladies will be admissible at the reading of 
these General Papers, which will be analogous in character 
to the Lectures referred to in the 5th Object of the Society. 
12. Finally, your Committee most earnestly trust, that all 
the labours of the important Society which is this day publicly 
inaugurated, may not only tend to promote the real advance- 
ment of a true Science of Nature among mankind ; but that, 
in the words of the motto which your Committee have adopted 
for the Institute, they may always also be undertaken and 
prosecuted ad majorem Dei gloriam. 
By order, 
J. REDDIE, 
Eon. Sec. 
The Rev. Henry Hare then moved the following Resolution:— 
That the Report of the Committee be adopted, printed and circulated ; and 
that the Committee be now constituted as the Council of the Institute, with 
full power to do all that they may think proper for its management, for the 
ensuing year. 
Thornton Hunt, Esq., seconded the Resolution, which was carried unani- 
mously. 
The Noble President then called upon the Rev. Walter Mitchell, 
M.A. (Vice-President), who read the following Inaugural Address: — 
My Lord Shaftesbury and Gentlemen, 
It is in deference to your expressed wishes, but with a 
profound sense of my inability to do justice to the subject on 
which I am called upon to address you, that I venture to 
inaugurate the proceedings of the Victoria Institute. I 
feel emboldened, however, by the belief that the objects of 
this Society are too noble and great in themselves to suffer 
in any degree from the weakness of their exponent. 
No one who watches the expression of thought by the culti- 
vated intellectual classes of this country, through its literature, 
can deny that the opinion that science and revelation are directly 
opposed to each other has been spreading with fearful rapidity. 
