Montreal City
McGill celebrated in 1904 her seventy-sixth anniversary, and in the lofty and glowing address made on that occasion by Principal and Vice-Chancellor Peterson, we find him saying—
"Manners are formed and personality is built up in the school of life,—even the student school. Honesty, purity, reverence,—all the moral virtues, in fact,—are just as important for the youth of the country as are learning and scholarships. We want to have a hall-mark for McGill men by which they may be known and recognised the world over. It lies with our students themselves to set the standard. 'How truly it is in man,' as Mr. Gladstone said to the students in Edinburgh, 'in man, and not in his circumstances, that the secret of his destiny resides. For most of you that destiny will take its final bent towards evil or towards good, not from the information you imbibe, but from the habits of mind, thought, and life that you shall acquire during your academic career. In many things it is wise to believe before experience; to believe until you may know; and believe me when I tell you that the thrift of time will repay you in after life with an usury of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams, and that the waste of it will make you dwindle, alike in intellectual and in moral stature, beneath your darkest reckonings.'"
There was one little incident in the scientific history of McGill that is not without its special interest to-day in the safe-guarding of human life. This was the first application of wireless telegraphy to the operation of moving trains. Many people now believe that in the wireless control of moving trains lies in the future the most effectual protection against railway accidents. It was in 1902, just six years after Marconi made his successes in England, that the experiment was first tried. Professor Ernest Rutherford, now of the University of Manchester, and Professor Howard T. Barnes, both of the Macdonald physical laboratory of McGill, were invited to accompany the American Association of General Passenger and Ticket Agents, who in that year held a convention in Portland. The Grand Trunk provided a special train from Chicago to Portland, and on this train, when moving at fifty miles an hour, signals were exchanged with a given station, and with the comparatively simple apparatus installed it was found possible to keep the train in communication with a station for a distance of eight or ten miles.
Ottawa was obviously created to be the capital of the Dominion. Her interesting history, initiated by the choice of Queen Victoria, the glory of whose long reign is a priceless possession of the Dominion, attracts careful study; and the first view over the charming city and its equally charming environment, is one to linger for a lifetime. The majestic beauty of her Parliament Buildings
"Set on the landscape like a crown;"
towers and bastions and buttresses clinging to the height on which they are built above the river; and the exquisite outline of the turrets and high-pointed tower of the magnificent Château Laurier all silhouetted against the western sky—
"Dim in the sunset's misty fires,"
offer a pictorial enchantment to linger in the memory. This young city, with hardly more than half a century's life behind it, has made itself a distinctive point in the States as well as in the Dominion.