Celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary. xlix 



example inspired the founding of other scientific associations, 

 with similar purpose, but none of these has had a record 

 more brilliant than this, their older sister. I congratulate 

 the Academy also on the assured prospect of an enlarged 

 work and a greater usefulness in the future. The scientific 

 world of a half century hence will have even greater reason 

 than has that of to-day to commemorate the story of its past 

 and to admire its perennial vigor and youth. 



I congratulate the audience also on the fact that I am not 

 going to talk on the subject — The Progress of Science since 

 1856 — which w^as suggested to me and which I have let stand 

 in default of a better title for my remarks. The progress of 

 science in the last half century cannot be treated in a fifteen 

 minute speech, even though the time allowance is very liber- 

 ally construed. It would take rather a book as large as this 

 precious first volume of your Transactions which your Secre- 

 tary has brought with him. I shall not, therefore, attempt to 

 develop my subject, but shall touch only two thoughts sug- 

 gested by the condition of science in 1856 and 1906. 



The founders of your Academy, like all true scientists, were 

 men of vision, else they would hardly have had faith to select 

 that motto which your seal has always borne : 



" Humanae adentiae et potentiae." 



In 1856 it took some faith to see that science embodied 

 human knowledge and power. That was in the pre-Dar- 

 winian age — a period as remote from our own, both on 

 the material and on the spiritual side of civilization, as 

 was Shakespeare's day remote from that time. Half a 

 century ago Wallace was in the Malay archipelago and had 

 not yet thought of the survival of the fittest. Darwin had 

 just published his treatise on barnacles, and, unknown to the 

 world, was seriously at work on that other book whose ab- 

 stract, published in 1859, started the great revolution in 

 human thought and life whose beginning none foresaw when 

 your Academy was founded, but which has rightly given to the 

 second half of the nineteenth century the name of the Age of 

 Darwin. These revolutionary changes have concerned both 



