10 CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF THE ACADEMY. 



behold, encii'cling this Academy as their original nucleus, their primal nebula, if I 

 may so speak, — a Natural History Society, with its manifold and growing collec- 

 tions and cabinets; a Technological Institute, with its admirable curriculum of 

 scientific education ; a splendid Museum of the Fine Arts ; an Observatory, with its 

 comet-seekers and transit instruments, and with its noble refractor ; the Lawrence 

 Scientific School ; the Chemical Laboratory of Professor Cooke ; the Garden and 

 Herbarium of our great botanist. Dr. Gray ; the magnificent Agassiz Museum of 

 Comparative Zoology, where an accomplished son is so nobly carrying on the cher- 

 ished work of his ever-honored and lamented father, and, close at its side, the 

 Peabody Museum of Ai'chajology and Ethnology ; and all our thriving associations 

 of History and Literature and Music, of Horticulture and Agriculture ; and, better 

 than all, the hosts of busy and devoted students in these and other institutions, 

 who are engaged, day by day and night by night, in searching out the mj^steries of 

 Nature, and extorting from her so many of the secrets which have been hid from 

 all human eyes and all human conceptions from the foundation of the world ! 



They would be convinced that there was, indeed, such a process as Evolution, 

 though I think they would be content, as some of their descendants still are, to 

 call it by the good old-fashioned name of development. They would certainly concur 

 in the idea that their little Academy had furnished, or fallen upon, a plentiful supply 

 of protoplasm, though I have great faith that they would cling tenaciously to the 

 simpler and more euphonious word — germ. At all events, they would be heard 

 exclaiming with one accord, in the sublime words with which our first President 

 concluded his inaugural discourse a hundred yeai's ago, " Great and marvellous are 

 thy works, Lord God Almighty, in wisdom hast thou made them all ! " 



And with these words I, too, must be allowed to close this attempt — from which 

 I would so gladly have been excused — to fill a gap which was not dreamed of until 

 a late hour of yesterday, and to deliver a centennial oration at less than twenty-four 

 hours' notice. If I have thus exhibited my reverence for the memory of our first 

 President, and my loyalty to the Academy in its hour of need, and if I have rendered 

 the lamented absence of my honored friend, Mr. Adams, less painful to himself as 

 well as to you, I shall be more than rewarded for the effort. I should be sorry, how- 

 ever, to be involved in such an emergency again, at least before the expiration of 

 another full hundred years ! 



Brief addresses were then made as follows : — 



