PROCEEDINGS—PERTHSHIRE SOCIETY OF NATURAL SCIENCE. lxxxi 
departments was in a very large measure due to the energy and 
forethought of their President. 
The President said that finished the history of the movement up 
to the present time, and he had very great pleasure in calling on Sir 
William Flower to give them his address. 
Sir W. H. Flower, who was received with loud and prolonged 
applause, said:— 
We are assembled to-day for the purpose of inaugurating a 
new era in the history of an institution which has already passed 
nearly 30 years of useful existence, but which, I venture to predict, 
has henceforth a career before it of wider and deeper import than 
anything that has gone before. I even think that this epoch in the 
history of the Institution might mark a distinct advance in the 
educational history of the country. The Perthshire Society of 
Natural Science was founded in 1867, under the presidency of the 
late Dr. Buchanan White, whose untimely death we have had so recent¬ 
ly to deplore. Its purpose was described to be “to carry 011 the prac¬ 
tical study of natural science by the exhibition and preservation of 
specimens, the reading of communications, by lectures, excursions, 
and by the formation of a museum and library.” It is hardly 
necessary for me to say anything in such a meeting as this upon the 
advantages of such work as the Society encouraged. We may take 
that for granted. The formation of such Societies in all the principal 
centres of population in the country, and not only in this country, 
but in all lands in which anything like intellectual culture has any hold 
upon the people, is a proof that they fulfil a natural want in the human 
mind in its present stage of development. The steady increase in 
the members of such Societies is mostly the offspring of the latter 
half of the present century, which shows that this want is becoming 
more keenly felt as time goes on. Of 63 Societies, more or less 
kindred in their aims to yours, scattered throughout the provinces of 
the British Isles, which are mentioned in the last report of the British 
Association for the Advancement of Science as “Corresponding 
Societies ” of the Association, 48 were founded in the second half of 
the century, only 15 in the first half, and not one goes back to an 
earlier period. Societies for the study of natural history are thus a 
growth of our own age, and a sign of its intellectual advance. 
But it is not of the Society generally that I am to speak to you. 
I have been privileged to say a few words upon one special feature 
belonging to it. At the foundation of the Society it was stated that 
one of the methods by which it proposed to carry on the practical 
study of natural science was by “ the formation of a museum.” It is 
to the value of museums especially as a means of education that I beg 
to be allowed to draw your attention. Of the general value of 
museums, using the word in its widest sense, as collections of works 
of art and of nature, in the intellectual advance of mankind there can 
be no question. How could art make any progress, how could it 
even exist, if its productions were destroyed as soon as they were 
created; if there were no museums, public or private, in which they 
could be preserved and made available to mankind now and hereafter ? 
How could science be studied without ready access to the materials 
