ADDRESS 
BY 
PROFESSOR SIR WILLIAM R. HAMILTON. 
It has fallen to my lot, Gentlemen, as one of your Secretaries for 
the year, to address you on the present occasion. The duty would, 
indeed, have been much better discharged had it been undertaken by 
my brother secretary ; but so many other duties of our secretaryship 
had been performed almost entirely by him, that I could not refuse to 
attempt the execution of this particular office, though conscious of its 
difficulty and its importance. For if we may regard it as a thing 
established now by precedent and custom that an annual address 
should be delivered, it is not, therefore, yet, and I trust that it will 
never be, an office of mere cold routine, a filling up of a vacant hour, 
on the ground that the hour must be some way or other got rid of. You 
have not left your homes—you have not adjourned from your several 
and special businesses—you have not gathered here, to have your time 
thus frittered away in an idle and unmeaning ceremonial. There 
ought to be, and there is, a reason that some such thing should be 
done ; that from year to year, at every successive reassembling, an 
officer of your body should lay before you such an address; and in 
remembering what this reason is, we shall be reminded also of the 
spirit in which the duty should be performed. The reason is the fit¬ 
ness and almost the necessity of providing, so far as an address can 
provide, for the permanence and progression of the body, by inform- 
ino > the new members, and reminding the old, of the objects and nature 
of the Association, or by giving utterance to at least a few of those 
reflections which at such a season present themselves respecting its 
progress and its prospects; and it is a valid reason, and deserves to 
be acted upon now, however little may have been left unsaid in the 
addresses of my predecessors in this office. For if even amongst the 
members who have attended former meetings, and have heard those 
eloquent addresses delivered by former secretaries, it is possible that 
1835. * d 
