ADDRESS 
AT THE OPENING OF THE SESSION 1885-6. 
BY’ W. SQUARE, F.R.O.S., F.R.G.S., 
President, 
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,— 
In opening this, our seventy-third session, I must first of 
all thank you for the honour you have done me in electing me 
your President. To anyone with the smallest aspirations to 
Scientific knowledge, the occupation of a chair like this must be 
a great gratification. 
We are a Literary and a Scientific Society, and so I choose the 
Scientific part, and wish to frame my Address upon that basis. 
No such Address could commence without a definition. I there- 
fore should define Science as ‘knowledge brought to order.” 
Society contains two classes of individuals. The first, those who 
want to know; and the second, those who do not. I take it that 
we members of the Plymouth Institution belong to the first class. 
Those of the second class we may relegate, as worthless, to oblivion. 
Those of the first class—ourselves—we may divide into (non- | 
politically) Tories and Radicals. JI use the terms advisedly, as 
they mean a great deal. There are Tory Scientists who fear the 
march of knowledge, because some pet theory of their own 
(probably outside the range of legitimate Science) is disturbed by 
it; and there are Radical Scientists who care for nothing as long 
as their enormous appetite for knowledge is satisfied. 
The world did not come by chance. It was made. And it is 
about the laws that govern it, and the making, that Radical 
Scientists think. 
VOL, IX. P 
