X. 



ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS. 

 CHARLES DARWIX. 



By the President, John Hopkinsox, F.L.S., F.G.S., F.E.M.S , 



F.R.Met.Soc. 



Delivered at the Annual Meeting , 2\st February, 1893, at Watford. 



Ladies and Gentlemen, — 



The history of science is a history of warfare, — of contests 

 between reason and prejudice. From the earliest times of which 

 we have any authentic record every new scientific idea has been 

 opposed by some pre-conceived notion, and although reason has 

 ever been victorious, prejudice is not yet completely vanquished. 

 Science, however, is not aggressive and does not marshal her 

 forces for direct attack ; she conquers by convincing her adversaries 

 of the justice of her cause and taking them into her own ranks, 

 rather than by storming their position and driving them from the 

 field of battle. The greatest of these contests in which science has 

 been engaged in recent years is that with which the name of 

 Charles Darwin will be for ever associated, — the contest between 

 the essentially scientific idea of progressive development by the 

 action of natural laws, and the absolutely unscientific notion of 

 distinct acts of creation by supernatural decree. 



Science has been defined as "the discernment, discrimination, 

 and classification of facts, and the discovery of their relations or 

 sequence." It is not a knowledge of things, but of causes and of 

 natural laws. We much more often perceive things and infer 

 causes, than we gain a knowledge of things by inference or of 

 causes by perception. If, for instance, we knew nothing of the 

 world on which we dwell, we might look around us on an open 

 plain or on the sea and conclude that the horizon bounding our 

 view was its limit. Changing our position laterally, we should 

 find that it was more extensive than we first thought it to be ; but 

 we might still think that it was flat and had an abrupt edge, a 

 view which was at one time held. By travelling round it, however, 

 we should find it to be a globe. If we merely changed our position 



VOL VII. PART IV. 8 



