When Man has to work in the dazzling light he 

 must wear goggles made by Man, and when he is in 

 the dark he cannot see. Animals of the cat tribe 

 have within themselves the power of adjusting the 

 cover of the lens of the eye that all degrees of 

 illumination are met without overstraining, and 

 in the dark they have some power not only of see- 

 ing but also of reflecting light from their eyes, 

 visible to others. Imagine also what a wonderful 

 variety of visual power, so insignificant a creature 

 as a May-fly has. He possesses a pair of eyes with 

 countless facets, sessile on his bead, another pair, 

 similirly facetted, raised on columns ; and in 

 addition to them, has three simple ocelli — one 

 cannot but think his power of vision must be in- 

 finitely superior to that of Man. 



Man sometimes suffers from internal irritation 

 and has to call in the aid of a specialist and swallow 

 his medicine ; an oyster when irritated by a foreign 

 substance has the means of extinguishing the 

 nuisance by coating it over with a self-made 

 nacreous substance called pearl, having the desired 

 effect, with a certainty of action that Man cannot 

 always predicate in respect of medicine. 



Man, in common with the rest of mammalia, has 

 locomotive powers which enable him to get from 

 place to place on the surface of the earth ; some 

 mammals are even as much at home in water as 

 on the ground, but most of them, and Man especi- 

 ally, can only walk. A bird or insect, however, 

 can walk on the surface of the earth, or soar to 

 almost invisible heights in the air where he is not 

 restricted in his flight in any direction; and in 

 that respect surely may claim to be superior to 

 Man. 



Whether we believe in pre-historic man or 

 not, whether we antedate the first appearance 

 of Man by thousands and thousands of years 

 beyond the usually recognized date, we are forced 

 by tacts to believe that Man has ever been in a 

 constant state of alteration of his wants, and that 

 his efforts have ever been towards meeting those 

 wants; whether that implies a greater degree of 

 real intelligence is, in my opinion, open 

 to doubt, for I think that the naval 

 architect who designs the most recent iron- 

 clad has not really any claim to be considered 

 more intelligent, more capable in brain power, 

 than Noah, who, anticipatiDg a disastrous flooding 

 of the country he lived in, constructed a sea- 

 worthy ship, capable of sheltering himself and 

 family and a great numberof animals, for all of whom 

 food would have to have sptcial accommodation. 

 and for whom food would have to be provided for 

 a lonely voyage of six weeks. 



I fear I may horrity many of my audience in 

 thus openly saying that in the matter of intelli- 

 gence we are not so far beyond our forefathers, for 

 the old idea still lintjers, despite evidence that is 

 constantly being brought forward, that even so 

 recently as the beginning of the Christian Era, 

 the inhabitants of these Islands were little more 

 than savages. True that they did not wear frock 

 coats, or their ladies sweep up the tilth of the 

 streets with their inconvenient and disease- 

 spreading skirts, but that they knew how 

 to cut out garments, to give one instance, is proved 

 by the fact that the words gusset and gore, words 

 the import of which I need not explain to my lady 



hearers, are purely British words, not to be found 

 in Koman or Saxon language. 



We appreciate the cleverness of the modern 

 safety pin, but our self complacency will receive a 

 rude shock if we go upstairs and see among the 

 undoubted Roman remains a Roman safety pin 

 which, perhaps, 1700 years ago, held in place 

 the garments of some fashionable lady. 



Our engineers execute prodigious works now, 

 they receive the most elaborate scientifi,c eduta- 

 tion, and can be relied upon to meet any 

 requirement of the age, and yet before theodolites 

 and spirit levels were dreamt of, one of the most 

 important towns in the world was supplied with 

 water by a system of conduits so well laid out and 

 so thoroughly built that when some ten or fifteen 

 years ago, European engineers were called upon 

 to design a scheme for bringing water to 

 Jerusalem, they reported that the works of King 

 Solomon were so well designed that they could 

 not but recommend that they should be simply 

 repaired where age or wanton destruction bad 

 rendered them inoperative. 



We cannot look upon the gigantic pyramids, 

 the temples of India, Egypt, or Peru wiihout 

 acknowledging that in the by-gone days, Man's 

 power of building and of designing must have 

 been wonderful. In these days we can handle and 

 use enormous blocks of stone or concrete by means 

 of cleverly designed steam cranes, and travelling 

 Titans, but I myself have seen a river dam one 

 thousand years old at least, many of the stones in 

 which were thirteen feet long and four feet 

 square, weighing about ten tons apiece, which had 

 been carried to the site from distant quarries, 

 fitted and laid in place without any of the elabo- 

 rate machinery of the present age. We could not 

 now-a-day handle such stones as those early 

 engineers did without machinery, so that in this 

 rebpect, Man, while he admires the grandeur of 

 modern machire-made piers, biidgtp, or towers, 

 should humbly acknowledge the skill of those 

 ancient engineers and artificers who could erect 

 such structures. 



One cf King Solomon's royal friends, evidently 

 a deep thinker, could not understand *' the way of 

 a serpent on a rock." How many of the present 

 generation have learnt what has comparatively 

 recently betn taught, how it is that a legless 

 reptile can progress at any rate he likes over the 

 smooth surface of a rock ? The question has been 

 investigated and the conclusiou is that the 

 abdominal scales worked by a set of muscles, act 

 on the minute irregularities of the surface of the 

 rock, much as human feet actuated by the leg 

 muscles, enable us to move forward ; although we 

 know this now, we did not know it a generation 

 or so back. 



We can now compress air until it becomes a 

 liquid of almost inconceivable cold and the 

 Ancients could not do that. We can speak to our 

 friends hundreds of miles away, by the invention 

 of the telephone within this generation, and such 

 a marvel was unknown ia ancient time ; we can 

 do many marvellous things, but I maintain the 

 things that were done centuries ago by Man were 

 even more marvellous, because modern science, 

 modern appliances were unknown, and if this is 

 so, am I not right in asking the question whether 



