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which did not exist to any great extent before. It may be also that a 

 certain rashness of speculation, and a tendency to introduce speculation 

 into regions which ordinary people profoundly feel not to be the exclusive 

 property of scientific men may have tended in the same direction. 

 When, for example, a man of high scientific position announces to us, 

 as a result of his investigations, that our great great great grandmothers 

 were hairy creatures, presumably not very easily distinguishable from 

 certain half-human looking brutes which may be seen in our own time 

 in the Zoological Gardens, — it is not much to be wondered at if many 

 of us should begin to feel that physical science was treading upon some- 

 what delicate ground. Our fathers perhaps we might have left to take 

 care of themselves; but to give our mothers beards, and to suppose that 

 they had sloughed them off only in comparatively late times, in deference 

 to a growing taste on the part of their mates, — may fairly be regarded as 

 rather hard to be swallowed, and somewhat unpleasant when it has 

 been. Nevertheless, I am persuaded that in the case of all such rash 

 speculations, our "strength is to sit still." No such speculation need 

 ruffle our tempers : still less need it make us full of alarm lest important 

 moral or religious truths should be in jeopardy : we may be quite sure 

 that false hypothesis, and unwarranted generaHzations, will not live long; 

 that if they have any seed of truth in them, that seed will take root and 

 survive ; and that if they are wholly false, they will sooner or later perish 

 altogether. "Magna est Veritas, et prsevalebit," is the motto at once 

 for a student of Physical Science and for a student of Theology ; it may 

 be written with equal propriety over the door of a lecture-room and over 

 the porch of a church ; it ought to be as dear to the President of a 

 Scientific and Literary Association, as it is to a Bishop of the Church of 

 Christ. I am quite sure that the more thoroughly we realise this, and 

 the more completely we agree to regard truth as the common treasure of 

 us all, the greater will be our happiness in seeking that treasure, and 

 the greater our chance of finding it. 



But it is time that I should be drawing this address to a close. I 

 have discoursed concerning Science and its advancement, to as great an 

 extent probably as your patience and your courtesy combined are willing 



