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38 railways from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Pacific Ocean, so that the fertile lands of Ontario, Manitoba, Columbia, and the Northwestern Territories will soon be available to the world. Still, practical science has much to accomplish. England and France, with only one fifth the fertile area of Canada, support eighty million people, while Canada has a population not exceeding five million.

A less far-seeing people than the Canadians might have invited the applied science which they so much require. But they knew that without science there are no applications. They no doubt felt with Emerson—

"And what if Trade sow cities Like shells along the shore, And thatch with towns the prairie broad With railways ironed o'er; They are but sailing foam-bells Along Thought's causing stream, And take their shape and sun-color From him that sends the dream."

So it was with a far-reaching foresight that the Canadian Government invited the British Association for the Advancement of Science to meet in Montreal. The inhabitants of Canada received us with open arms, and the science of the Dominion and that of the United Kingdom were welded. We found in Canada, as we had every reason to expect, men of manly and self-reliant character, who loved not less than we did the old home from which they had come. Among them is the same healthiness of political and moral life, with the same love of truth which distinguishes the English people. Our great men are their great men; our Shakespeare, Milton, and Burns belong to them as much as to ourselves; our Newton, Dalton, Faraday, and Darwin are their men of science as much as they are ours. Thus a common possession and mutual sympathy made the meeting in Canada a successful effort to stimulate the progress of science, while it established, at the same time, the principle that all people of British origin—and I would fain include our cousins in the United States—possess a common interest in the intellectual glories of their race, and ought, in science at least, to constitute part and parcel of a common empire, whose heart may beat in the small islands of the Northern seas, but whose blood circulates in all her limbs, carrying warmth to them, and bringing back vigor to us. Nothing can be more cheering to our association than to know that many of the young communities of English-speaking people all over the globe—in India, China, Japan, the Straits, Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand, the Cape—have founded scientific societies in order to promote the growth of scientific research. No doubt science, which is only a form of truth, is one in all lands, but still its unity of purpose and fulfillment received an important practical expression by our visit to Canada. This community of