mes New York; Fort
Orange and its dependent hamlet assumes the name of Albany. A century of
various fortune succeeds; the scourge of French and Indian war is rarely
absent from the land; every shock of European policy vibrates with
electric rapidity across the Atlantic; but the year 1756 finds a
population of 300,000 in your growing province. Albany, however, may
still be regarded almost as a frontier settlement. Of the twelve
counties into which the province was divided a hundred years ago, the
county of Albany comprehended all that lay north and west of the city;
and the city itself contained but about three hundred and fifty houses.

[Footnote A: These historical notices are, for the most part, abridged
from Mr. Brodhead's excellent history of New York.]

TWO HUNDRED YEARS.

One more century; another act in the great drama of empire; another
French and Indian War beneath the banners of England; a successful
Revolution, of which some of the most momentous events occurred within
your limits; a union of States; a Constitution of Federal Government;
your population carried to the St. Lawrence and the great Lakes, and
their waters poured into the Hudson; your territory covered with a
net-work of canals and railroads, filled with life and action, and
power, with all the works of peaceful art and prosperous enterprise with
all the institutions which constitute and advance the civilization of
the age; its population exceeding that of the Union at the date of the
Revolution; your own numbers twice as large as those of the largest city
of that day, you have met together, my Friends, just two hundred years
since the erection of the little church of Beverswyck, to dedicate a
noble temple of science and to take a becoming public notice of the
establishment of an institution, destined, as we trust, to exert a
beneficial influence on the progress of useful knowledge at home and
abroad, and through that on the general cause of civilization.

SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS.

You will observe that I am careful to say the progress of science "at
home and abroad;" for the study of Astronomy in this country has long
since, I am happy to add, passed that point where it is content to
repeat the observations and verify the results of European research. It
has boldly and successfully entered the field of original investigation,
discovery, and speculation; and there is not now a single departm