22 The Period from 1871 to 1880 



Time was, and not long ago, when such questions as these were regarded as useless 

 and vain, — when students of natural history, unmindful of what the name denotes, were 

 content with a knowledge of things as they now are, but gave little heed as to how 

 they came to be so. Now, such questions are held to be legitimate, and perhaps not 

 wholly unanswerable. It cannot now be said that these trees inhabit their present re- 

 stricted areas simply because they are there placed in the climate and soil of all the 

 world most congenial to them. These must indeed be congenial, or they would not sur- 

 vive. But when we see how Australian Eucalyptus trees thrive upon the Californian 

 coast, and how these very Redwoods flourish upon another continent ; how the so-called 

 wild oat (Avena sterilis of the Old World) has taken full possession of California ; 

 how that cattle and horses, introduced by the Spaniard, have spread as widely and 

 made themselves as much at home on the plains of La Plata as on those of Tartary ; and 

 that the cardoon-thistle seeds, and others they brought with them, have multiplied there 

 into numbers probably much exceeding those extant in their native lands ; indeed, 

 when we contemplate our own race, and our own particular stock, taking such recent 

 but dominating possession of this New World ; when we consider how the indigenous 

 flora of islands generally succumbs to the foreigners which come in the train of man; 

 and that most weeds (i.e., the prepotent plants in open soil) of all temperate climates 

 are not "to the manner born," but are self-invited intruders, — we must needs abandon 

 the notion of any primordial and absolute adaptation of plants and animals to their 

 habitats, which may stand in lieu of explanation, and so preclude our inquiring any 

 further. 



J. Lawrence Smith (chemistry), president at the meeting in Dubuque, 

 Iowa, in 1872, delivered his address as retiring president at the meeting at 

 Portland, Maine, in August, 1873. Smith's address consisted of three parts, 

 the first a defense of pure research, stimulated no doubt by the popular fame 

 of technicians and inventors. The second part was devoted to a discussion 

 of the methods of science in which he spoke very critically of a tendency 

 among scientists to abandon the Baconian method and to indulge in specu- 

 lations, pyramiding one on another until they had little relationship to ex- 

 perience. He closed with remarks about the habit of claiming that science 

 supports religion, a habit that still lingers. A quotation will make clear his 

 point of view (vol. 22, pp. 1-26) : 



Reference has already been made to the tendency of quitting the physical to revel in 

 the metaphysical, which, however, is not peculiar to this age, for it belonged as well to 

 the times of Plato and Aristotle as it does to ours. More special reference will be 

 made here to the proclivity of the present epoch among philosophers and theologians to 

 parade science and religion side by side; talking of reconciling science and religion, as 

 if they had ever been unreconciled. Scientists and theologians may have quarrelled, but 

 never science and religion. At dinners they are toasted in the same breath, and calls 

 made on clergymen to respond, who, for fear of giving offence, or lacking the fire and 

 firmness of St. Paul, utter a vast amount of platitudes about the beauty of science and 

 the truth of religion, trembling in their shoes all the time, fearing that science, falsely 

 so called, may take away their professional calling, instead of uttering in voice of 

 thunder, like the Boanerges of the gospel, that "the world by wisdom knew not God." 

 And it never will. Our religion is made so plain by the light of faith that the way- 

 faring man, though a fool, cannot err therein. 



