I 
PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 
AT THE OPENING OF THE SESSION 1870-71. 
I HAVE the honour to inaugurate the fifty-eighth year of the life 
of this Institution. Reasoning by analogy with animal life we 
should expect to find in our institution the phenomena presented 
in faltering infancy, vigorous manhood, and decrepid old age. But 
there is no true analogy between the life of an institution, and the 
life of the individual members who compose it. An institution 
may be better compared with an animal type, a living species, 
which remains from generation to generation, perpetual in the 
midst of mortality, permanent though the lives of its members may 
endure no longer than the life of the beautiful ephemera. Nature 
preserves her types through all the dangers that beset the individual 
mortals which compose them ; in the words of Tennyson — 
" So careful of the type she is, 
So careless of the single life." 
If the type varies, it is but by slow imperceptible degrees, not 
easily recognized except by the researches of the man of science 
and the philosopher, who, like Mr. Darwin, draws startling deduc- 
tions from complicated series of observations. 
Let us, then, compare our institution rather with a type than 
with an individual, and if in the lapse of time it vary in its 
characteristics, let it vary on the principle propounded by Mr. 
Darwin, let it vary in a direction that will afford it advantage in 
the struggle for life, in a direction which will tend to perpetuate 
its existence. 
To what principle then does this institution owe its existence ? 
To what qualities is it indebted for its present vitality? "What 
development will it require for its future vigour ? 
In the year 1858 the President, Mr. J. N. Bennett, delivered an 
