Now, sir, with a view to the adequate performance of my functions to-night, I have been reading the address of my predecessor, our friend Professor Masson, and as I am quite sure that you have all read Professor Masson’s address too, it will not be necessary on this occasion to condescend upon details. You know more than I do about the constitution of these Societies, and you may perhaps be able--which I am not--to decide as to their relative antiquity. But there is one sinister and significant sentence in Professor Masson’s address to which I commend your attention. He says that for sixteen years the post of President was vacant, because no one could be found willing to accept the responsibility of delivering the Presidential Address. Now, if that does not move your compassion for the person who has that courage, your hearts must be harder than adamant. There is another sentence which produced a great awe and effect upon my mind. It is said that the Societies had done much good work which did not seem affected materially by the absence or the presence of their President, and as specimen of that good work he said that no less than twenty thousand essays had been delivered to the Societies in the course of their existence. Twenty thousand essays! That is a hard saying. Twenty thousand essays, blown into space! And it leads further to this appalling calculation, that if a gentleman hearing of the Associated Societies had determined to improve his mind by reading these essays, and had determined to read one every day before breakfast, it would have been sixty years before he had accomplished the task. Now, that to me, I confess, is not the precious fact in connection with these Societies. What to me is precious is this, that they garnered up so much of what is illustrious, both in regard to memories and to men in connection with Edinburgh. Take, for example, the Dialectic Society, which was founded in 1787. Well, how brilliant was Edinburgh in 1787! A race was growing up in your schools and in your universities which was destined afterwards, through the means of the _Edinburgh Review_, to influence largely both the taste and the policy of these islands. They were at that time pretty young, the most of them. Cockburn--Lord Cockburn--was being flogged every ten days at the High School, every ten days according to a minute and pathetic calculation that he has left behind him. Jeffrey--Lord Jeffrey--was at that time entering Glasgow University in his fourteenth year; and as for Lord Brougham, he was at that moment commencing a career of conflict by a struggle with a master of his class, in which, I need hardly say, Brougham came off victorious. Dugald Stewart was lecturing at that time, not merely to Edinburgh, but to the kingdom, and almost to the world at large, and Edinburgh was the centre to which all the intellect of Great Britain might, without exaggeration, be said to have gravitated. At that time the English universities were slumbering.