Each member was also provided with an engraved card of the hall of meeting, on which the numbers of the seats were printed in black ink, and his own peculiar seat marked in red ink, so that every person immediately found his own place, and knew where to look for any friend whom he might wish to find.
At the hour appointed for the opening of the meeting, the members being assembled, and the galleries and orchestra being filled by an assemblage of a large part of the rank and beauty of the capital, and the side-boxes being occupied by several branches of the royal family, and by the foreign ambassadors, the session of the academy was opened by the eloquent address of the president.
SPEECH made at the Opening of the Society of German Naturalists and Natural Philosophers at Berlin, the 18th of September, 1828 .-- By ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT.
Since through your choice, which does me so much honour, I am permitted to open this meeting, the first duty which I have to discharge is one of gratitude.

The distinction which has been conferred on him who has never yet been able to attend your excellent society, is not the reward of scientific efforts, or of feeble and persevering attempts to discover new phenomena, or to draw the light of knowledge from the unexplored depths of nature.

A finer feeling, however, directed your attention to me.

You have assured me, that while, during an absence of many years, and in a distant quarter of the globe, I was labouring in the same cause with yourselves, I was not a stranger in your thoughts.

You have likewise greeted my return home, that, by the sacred tie of gratitude, you might bind me still longer and closer to our common country.
What, however, can the picture of this, our native land, present more agreeable to the mind, than the assembly which we receive to-day for the first time within our walls; from the banks of the Neckar, the birth-place of Kepler and of Schiller, to the remotest border of the Baltic plains; from hence to the mouths of the Rhine, where, under the beneficent influence of commerce, the treasuries of exotic nature have for centuries been collected and investigated, the friends of nature, inspired with the same zeal, and, urged by the same passion, flock together to this assembly.