INAFGUEAL ADDEESS. 
101 
The title of finishmg-school seems to be usually, and of course 
more properly, adopted for ladies' schools than for any others. 
The lecturer, therefore, with whom we have indulged our imagina- 
tion, and to whom I have referred in the masculine gender, will 
considerably enhance that ideal indulgence by assuming the form 
of a lady. 
This fair creature of our fancy is, however, purely imaginary. 
There is only one finishing-school for us, and that is our death 
bed. Our education is our daily, our hourly duty, capable also of 
affording us our greatest pleasure, during the whole course of our 
lives, and can never approach a finished state. But the burden of 
responsibility for our education, heavy as it is, heavy as I have 
endeavoured to represent it, and I should wish to add to the sense 
of weight under that burden, must be transferred from others and 
taken upon ourselves as we pass out of childhood, and we shall be 
much in fault if we neglect the means that are offered to us for 
that purpose. There must be few among us, when we reach 
middle life, who have not to mourn over neglected opportunities, 
with unavailing regret, in serious sadness. 
It is in this light that I desire to present this Institution to 
your notice, to place it before you, and urge you to represent it to 
others, as offering opportunities for helping one another in our 
education, which we ought not to neglect ; to invite you to 
recognize its great value, and to perform my duty as President by 
exhorting you to advocate its claims as a field for the exercise and 
development of the mental activity of Plymouth, and to render it 
all the support that it so richly deserves at your hands. 
The particular branches of education to which this Institution 
is devoted are represented in our museum, our library, our lectures, 
and our discussions ; and if you recognize any truth in the obser- 
vations that I have made on the characteristics of the intellectual 
progress of the day, it is essential for its welfare that every part 
of our Institution should correspond to what I have described as 
the prevailing tone of thought. 
A museum that would adequately serve a scientific purpose 
would tax the energies of our curator to the utmost*". 
Our library is in the hands of a curator who answers my 
description of a painstaking, sedulous worker, who acknowledges 
order, regularity, and system, as the powers that be, and whose 
care has arranged on the shelves a scientific library of no little 
o 
