506 Meeting of the British Association. (Oct., 
the grossly speculative character of many asserted facts in Astro- 
nomy, a science which did not rightly claim to be the Queen of 
Sciences, Dr. Hooker passed on to speak of Pre-historic Archeology. 
To this study he would accord the dignity of a science. It most 
clearly proclaimed to us that man himself inhabited this earth for 
many thousands of years before the historic period,—a result little 
expected less than thirty years ago, when the Rey. W. VY. Harcourt, 
in his address to the Association at Birmingham, observed that 
“Geology points to the conclusion that the time durmg which man- 
kind has existed on the globe cannot materially differ from that 
assigned by Scripture,” “referring,” Dr. Hooker added, “to the 
so-called Scripture chronology, which has no warrant in the Old 
Testament and which gives 5,874 years as the age of the inhabited 
lobe.” 
‘ A great deal had been recently said as to the connection between 
science and religion. It was most important that their attitude 
should be mutually considerate and friendly.; 
The religious teachers had not always shown this spirit, though 
there was a greater tendency to it now than formerly. Science 
and religion might work in harmony and with good will, if both 
parties remembered that the laws of mind are not yet relegated to 
the domain of the teachers of physical science, and that the laws of 
matter are not within the religious teachers’ province. 
“ But,” concluded the President, “if they would thus work in 
harmony, both parties must beware how they fence with that most 
dangerous of two-edged weapons, Natural Theology, a science 
falsely so called, when, not content with trustfully accepting truths 
hostile to any presumptuous standard it may set up, it seeks to 
weigh the infinite in the balance of the finite, and shifts its ground 
to meet the requirements of every new fact that science establishes, 
and every old error that science exposes. Thus pursued, Natural 
Theology is to the scientific man a delusion, and to the religious man 
a snare, leading too often to disordered intellects and to atheism. 
“One of our deepest thinkers, Mr. Herbert Spencer, has said, 
‘Tf religion and science are to be reconciled, the basis of the recon- 
ciliation must be this deepest, widest, and most certain of facts, that 
the power which the universe manifests to us, is utterly inscrutable.’ 
The bonds that unite the physical and spiritual history of man, and 
the forces which manifest themselves in the alternate victories of 
mind and of matter over the actions of the individual, are, of all 
the subjects that physics and psychology have revealed to us, the 
most absorbing, and are, perhaps, utterly inscrutable. In the 
investigation of their phenomena is wrapped up that of the past 
and the future, the whence and the whither, of his existence ; and, 
after a knowledge of these the human soul still passionately yearns 
and cries.” 
