ice, attended by Governors, Professors, and students, was
held in Molson Hall. Principal Peterson in his address said:

"Since we met in our various classrooms last week, a great and good life
has been brought to its appointed end. Sir William Dawson had
considerably overpassed the span of life of which the Psalmist speaks:
it was 'by reason of strength' that it was for him well-nigh fourscore
years. Ever since he assumed the Principalship in November, 1855--that
is, for a period of exactly forty-four years--he has been the most
prominent figure connected with this University. The last years of his
life--since 1893--have been spent, it is true, in retirement from active
work, but he has been with us in spirit all this time. Many of us know
how closely, and with what a fatherly interest, he has followed all our
later history. And now his life has closed, in great physical weakness,
but happily unaccompanied by distress or suffering:

"'Of no distemper, of no blast he died,
But fell like autumn fruit that mellow'd long.'

"Busy, active and strenuous all his days, he must have chafed, I fancy,
during recent years under a growing sense of uselessness--almost an
impatience at being laid aside from work, which had been to him so long
the very breath of life; yet none ever said with more simple, childlike
resignation, 'Thy way, not mine!' For such a painless passing out of
life, no vote of sorrow need be struck. There is no sting in a death
like his: the grave is not his conqueror. Rather has death been
swallowed up in victory--the victory of a full and complete life, marked
by earnest endeavour, untiring industry, continuous devotion and
self-sacrifice, together with an abiding and ever-present sense of
dependence on the will of Heaven. His work was done, to quote the
Puritan poet's noble line: 'As ever in his great taskmaster's eye'; and
never for a moment did he waver in his feeling of personal
responsibility to a personal God. Others will speak to you of his
record as a scientific man. I shall permit myself only to say that few
can have an adequate idea of the power and forcefulness revealed in the
mere fact that one who had so onerous a part to play as a college head
should have been able to keep up scientific work at all. A weaker nature
would have exhausted itself in the problems of administration.

"He, himself, has left it on record, in his paper entitled,
'Thirty-eight Years of McGill,' that these years