822 president's address. 



change, which affected man's entire attitude towards the problems 

 presented by his own being and by the world around him. 



The gradual but momentous change in point of view which 

 thus set in revealed itself in many directions, but preeminently 

 in the impetus given to methods of naturalistic interpretation of 

 phenomena. 



Closely associated with this tendency was another which made 

 for an "emancipation of our ideas of the past from their bondage to 

 the present " in the interpretation of sequences of events in time. 

 This we may describe as the dawn of the scientific historical 

 method, whose fuller development and wider application to the most 

 varied phenomena has borne such remarkable fruit during the 

 present century. 



It was not, indeed, within the domain of the natural sciences, 

 strictly so-called, that the first indications of the development of 

 this method may be clearly perceived. Rather it took form as 

 applied in explanation of the successive aspects of philosophic 

 thought in the eighteenth century. Yet evolutionary science 

 is its flower or fruit; and if this cannot safely be said to have arisen 

 primarily as a biological speculation, it is nevertheless the greatest 

 achievement of modern biology to have provided a detailed 

 demonstration of some of its leading factors and modes of operation 

 in one great sphere of cosmic phenomena. 



A brief consideration of the state of biological opinion in the 

 time of Linnaeus may serve to make the subsequent progress 

 clearer. Linnaeus himself was far from being a highly speculative 

 biologist. Preeminently an observer and recorder of facts, his 

 monumental system of classification was admirably adapted to the 

 necessities of his generation. Although substantially a morpho- 

 logical system, based upon facts of structure, the Linnaean 

 classification was artificial as regards its criteria. Still, for 

 Linnaeus himself, those more or less arbitrary structural criteria 

 were only the earmarks, as it were, of a true and actual 

 relationship of the difi'erent plants and animals to each other. 

 Such a relationship was conceived by him as indicative of 

 community of origin in the beginning of things in the creative 



