THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS 449 



first sight under the microscope of objects otherwise invisible 

 produces in even the most uninstructed mind. Most of us 

 probably can date our first interest in minute living objects 

 from the time when, perhaps in early youth, we were given, 

 or allowed to use, a microscope, with which we could gratify, 

 without satisfying, our curiosity in looking at all kinds of minute 

 objects. In such an occupation the appetite comes with eating, 

 as the French proverb says, and the instrument which was at 

 first a fascinating toy leads us on until, one might almost 

 say, it masters and enslaves us. In this development there is 

 another instance of the parallel between the progress of the 

 individual and the history of the race. To the majority of early 

 microscopists the microscope was but a toy, an instrument which 

 competed with the magic-lantern as an amusement for drawing- 

 room seances, and only a serious minority made use of it as a 

 means of earnest scientific investigation. There are perhaps still 

 microscopists whose chief delight is to thrill their friends, especially 

 those of the fair sex, by the sight of hairs on a spider's leg, or the 

 elephantine proportions of a cheese-mite. If so, let us not scoff, 

 as some do, at the amateur ; we ought rather to regard him with 

 the same interest that a zoologist looks on an okapi or a lepi- 

 •dosiren, as a living representative of a bygone age. For the 

 modern microscopist is fearfully in earnest, and has but little 

 opportunity for amusement in pursuing a science which taxe> 

 not only his brain, but his eyes, to the utmost. There is scarcely 

 any greater physical strain than the long-continued investigation 

 carried on with the highest powers of the microscope, and in my 

 own experience I have known some who lacked the physical 

 endowment for such work, and others w T ho have been obliged 

 to retire disabled from the field. Let us, then, in a pursuit which 

 but too frequently dulls enthusiasm by fatigue and exhaustion, 

 in which our " native hue of resolution " tends to become 

 " sicklied o'er by the pale cast of thought," rather envy those 

 who retain the freshness of their early delight, and strive to 

 cultivate, rather than to stifle, that feeling of wonder and 

 curiosity which should be the starting-point of all philosophical 

 and scientific investigation. " Two things," said Kant, " fill my 

 mind with ever-renewed wonder and awe, the more often and the 

 deeper I dwell on them — the starry vault above me and the 

 moral law within me." I venture to think that had Kant lived 



