PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 77 



part of the vast body of knowledge which constitutes the modern 

 sciences of physics, chemistry, biology, and geology has been 

 acquired, and the widest generalizations therefrom have been 

 deduced, and, furthermore, the majority of those applications of 

 scientific knowledge to practical ends which have brought about 

 the most striking differences between our present civilization and 

 that of antiquity have been made within that period of time." 



It is within the past half century, he continued, that the most 

 brilliant additions have been made to fact and theory and service- 

 able hypothesis in the i-egion of pure science, for within this time 

 falls the establishment on a safe basis of the greatest of all the 

 generalizations of science, the doctrines of the Conservation of 

 Energy and of Evolution. Within this time the larger moiety of 

 our knowledge of light, heat, electricity, and magnetism has been 

 acquired. Our present chemistry has been, in great part, created, 

 while the whole science has been remodelled from foundation to 

 roof. 



'' It may be natural," continued Professor Huxley, "■ that 

 progress should appear most striking to me among those sciences 

 to which my own attention has been directed, but I do not think 

 this will wholly account for the apparent advance ' by leaps and 

 bounds' of the biological sciences within my recollection. The 

 cell theory was the latest novelty when I began to work ^vith the 

 microscope, and I have watched the building of the whole vast 

 fabric of histology. I can say almost as much of embryology, 

 since Von Baer's great work was published in 1S2S. Our 

 knowledge of the morphology of the lower plants and animals 

 and a great deal of that of the higher forms has very largely been 

 obtained in my time ; while physiology has been put upon a to- 

 tally new foundation, and, as it were, reconstructed, by the thor- 

 ough application of the experimental method to the study of the 

 phenomena of life, and bv the accurate determination of the 

 purely physical and chemical components of these phenomena. 



