The disturbances which we have experienced with our acquisition make room for the, foundation of a future social greatness.

Admitting this position, how can we advance this end? The difficulties of experiment in a new country will, doubtless, give additional importance to the culture of correct and minute observation. Who can predict the result which will arise from the simplest discoveries? A stain upon a stone, a drop of coloured water, may prove of sufficient signifcance to fill the mountain's solitudes with the iron life of machinery. Let us prove, rather than assert, the utility of research. Let us enforce a due recognition of the labour of the inventor and discoverer until his national importance be acknowledged.

And while thus in a general view, we cannot fail to see the value of those pursuits, how much more do they force themselves upon our observation when we scan them in detail.

The objects of our Institution will not be answered unless the geologist, the chemist, and teh representative of the associated sciences conjointly labour to produce those results which have justly become the pride and glory of the civilised world.

The mere mechanical arts are but the secondary results of science, and as accumulating facts, though necessarily labourious, are the first step towards eliminating truth; let us therefore sturdily arm ourselves to the acquisition of them, forgetting even what has been termed the sublimity of deductive philosophy, in the no less honorable, but no less arduous and valuable, efforts of the practical experimentalist.

Such labours, ever pursued under difficulties, seldom rewarded commensurately with their importance, it shall be our duty and our interest to facilitate; and while thus striving for these ends let us endeavour to secure, by singleness of purpose and unity of action, the general sympathy.

Royal Society of Victoria