THE PRESIDENTS ADDEESS. Sy ie 
prevailed, the great philanthropic movements for the improvement of 
the treatment of criminals, of the insane, of idiots, of the mute, and 
of the blind, the attack upon the use of alcoholic beverages, and 
various other great humanitarian enterprises. 
Tn literature, a new race of poets arose, untrammeled by received 
traditions as to the form or the subjects of poetry. Germany produced 
her first and only great poets, Schiller and Goethe ; in England the 
poetical glory of many preceding ages was eclipsed by that which 
produced Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron and Scott. The 
modern philosophical method of writing history was developed by 
Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Robertson and Gibbon. Contemporane- 
ously with all these intellectual and spiritual movements arose a great 
scientific one. The latter half of the eighteenth century is preémi- 
nently an era of the promulgation of great scientific theories and the 
discovery of great natural laws. In this work the intellect of France, 
the country which was most powerfully affected by the great upheaval 
‘was by far the most prominent. Lavoisier laid the foundation of 
chemical science by propoundiug his oxygen theory. To Romé de 
Lisle, we owe the science of crystallography, to the two Jussieus is 
due the natural system of classification in botany ; in zoology, Cuvier 
originated the idea of types, and the same thinker may claim the 
merit of being one of the fathers of the science of geology. To 
Fourier, another Frenchman, we owe the accepted theory of the con- 
duction, to Prevost that of the radiation of heat. Coulomb, one of the 
greatest names in electricity and magnetism, and Laplace, perhaps 
the greatest advancer of mathematical astronomy since Newton, were 
likewise Frenchmen of this age, and to these may be added a whole 
host of lesser names. 
In English-speaking countries the spirit of scientific research was 
only less active. The names of Black, Cavendish, Priestley, Erasmus 
Darwin, Smith the geologist, Franklin, and the first Herschel at once 
occur to every one. More eminent than any of these are Dalton, the 
propounder of the atomic theory in chemistry, and Thomas Young, 
the establisher of the undulatory theory of light, both of whom 
flourished about the commencement of this century. In Italy, the 
foundations of galvanism were laid by Galvani ; in Germany, we have 
Werner, the geologist, and Goethe, the poet, whgse theories on the 
morphology of animals and plants, show that his scientific was not 
greatly inferior to his literary ability. From that time the number 
