20 The Twenty-third General Meeting. 
the very interesting lecture which he had been good enough to give 
them. For his own part he confessed himself to have been born in 
what the late Lord Derby termed the “ pre-scientific period,” and the 
consequence was that a considerable part of what Sir John Lubbock 
had stated had passed over his mind with much less impression 
than it would, he trusted, when he had an opportunity of reading 
it. Those things in which the Members of the Society took so 
great an interest were of the greatest possible consequence, and he 
cordially agreed with the concluding portion of Sir John Lubbock’s 
remarks. But he was an old schoolmaster, and he should like to 
know what they would all become if the whole cycle of science was 
to be entered into by students seeking a higher education? What 
would they become? why, they would become, each one of them, 
Wiltshire in miniature, highly informed in matters dating from the 
earliest to the latest times, and knowing all things that man knew 
or could know. He should be very sorry indeed to say one syllable 
in disparagement of that not less than sacred and holy work which 
science was doing for the human race. Every single department of 
science was precious in the last degree, and he entirely agreed with 
the sentiments of Sir John Lubbock, as far as his own wretchedly 
small knowledge of science enabled him to judge, that every depart- 
ment of science was necessary to the full development of the rest. 
As long as science was tentative, and made its steps sure and certain 
as it advanced, let it go on, and might God bless it. It could not 
be otherwise than beneficial to mankind, not only in the ways in 
which they could trace, but in the untraceable improvement of the 
human race which consisted in the attainment of higher stages of 
knowledge that was precious ; but, more than that, there was not 
one department of science from which they did not derive great 
physical, social, and even moral and religious benefit. But above — 
and beyond all those steps of steady scientific investigation, which 
he recognised as great steps in the improvement of the human 
race, there was and must be in the progress of science a glorious 
capacity of guessing. It was, in point of fact, one of the necessities 
of science that as it made each step forward it went at once into an 
infinitude of guesses. But let them not confound the mere guesses 
