144 INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS 



indignation excited by the seeming vagaries of a Paracelsus, the fear 

 and trembling lest the strange doctrine of Copernicus should under- 

 mine the faith of centuries, were all helps to the germination of the 

 seed - - stimuli to thought which urged it on to explore the new fields 

 opened up to its occupation. This given, all that has since followed 

 came out in regular order of development, and need be here con- 

 sidered only in those phases having a special relation to the purpose 

 of our present meeting. 



So slow was the growth at first that the sixteenth century may 

 scarcely have recognized the inauguration of a new era. Torricelli 

 and Benedetti were of the third generation after Leonardo, and 

 Galileo, the first to make a substantial advance upon his theory, was 

 born more than a century after him. Only two or three men appeared 

 in a generation who, working alone, could make real progress in dis- 

 covery, and even these could do little in leavening the minds of their 

 fellow men with the new ideas. 



Up to the middle of the seventeenth century an agent which all 

 experience since that time shows to be necessary to the most pro- 

 ductive intellectual activity was wanting. This was the attraction of 

 like minds, making suggestions to each other, criticising, comparing, 

 and reasoning. This element was introduced by the organization of 

 the Royal Society of London and the Academy of Sciences of Paris. 



The members of these two bodies seem like ingenious youth sud- 

 denly thrown into a new world of interesting objects, the purposes and 

 relations of which they had to discover. The novelty of the situation 

 is strikingly shown in the questions which occupied the minds of the 

 incipient investigators. One natural result of British maritime enter- 

 prise was that the aspirations of the Fellows of the Royal Society 

 were not confined to any continent or hemisphere. Inquiries were 

 sent all the way to Batavia to know "whether there be a hill in 

 Sumatra which burneth continually, and a fountain which runneth 

 pure balsam." The astronomical precision with which it seemed pos- 

 sible that physiological operations might go on was evinced by the 

 inquiry whether the Indians can so prepare that stupefying herb 

 Datura that "they make it lie several days, months, years, according 

 as they will, in a man's body without doing him any harm, and at 

 the end kill him without missing an hour's time." Of this continent 

 one of the inquiries was whether there be a tree in Mexico that yields 

 water, wine, vinegar, milk, honey, wax, thread, and needles. 



Among the problems before the Paris Academy of Sciences those 

 of physiology and biology took a prominent place. The distillation 

 of compounds had long been practiced, and the fact that the more 

 spirituous elements of certain substances were thus separated nat- 

 urally led to the question whether the essential essences of life might 

 not be discoverable in the same way. In order that all might par- 



