The object for which we meet this evening is to inaugurate the VICTORIAN INSTITUTE.

We assemble in the vestibule of the Temple of Science, many of us unacquainted one with the other, invited to engage in a course of mutual improvement, and to assist in the cause of general instruction.

The invitation is one which it does not become us to slight; it holds out not only the certainty of much agreeable mental recreation, but also the means, if duly employed, of attaining and diffusing many substantial benefits. It affords an opportunity to those who become members of collecting materials and interesting facts respecting the multitudinous subjects which form topics for the rational inquirer, and to which careful and well regulated observation will attach an accredited worth; of arranging and collating them so as to facilitate investigation and attract the attention of those competent to exercise thereon an enlightened judgment; of provoking opinions or theories which may at least test the intrinsic merit of those heretofore current; and of recording in authentic form, the discoveries or speculations of those who have hitherto individually in private prosecuted their unobtrusive studies, simply for the enjoyment yielded by the pursuit, and of those who may now be stimulated to join in giving their thoughts and views a public circulation.

The occasion appears to be propitious for the success of such an institution. This is not an era which will tolerate the division of acroatic[1] and exoteric learning, or recognise barriers within which the unintiated are not permitted to encroach; men are no longer content that the search for knowledge should be delegated to the exclusive charge of any particular body, involved in the frivolous niceties of alchemical empiricism; clouding in allegory or shrouding in mystic symbols the steps by which they, as they supposed, approached the secret of the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, or the universal solvent;—no longer amused with the acuminated subtleties of metaphysical disquisitions, dogmatic theology, or philological dissertations. Theories are not now dozed over for a lifetime, to pass away as idle dreams. We live in an age in which the difficulties which arrested the profoundest masters of antiquity and drew forth desponding lamentations of the impossibility of their solution, or ambiguous prophecies[2] of the probability of their removal, have been subjugated by the ever-strengthening am of Science: in which tangible realities and practical demonstra tion, from what order soever they may emanate, are accepted and appreciated; and in which each one who can add to the treasury, and enrich it with a new idea, or shed a ray of light upon any of the obscurities which deface the disk of learning, will be acknowledged as a benefactor and hailed as a good and faithful servant in the cause.

Royal Society of Victoria