6 INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 
was ruled as much by laws, universal and eternal, as the move- 
ments in the planetary world. In recent days the great anatomic 
Professor Hyrtl, after he saw his main work pass through eighteen 
editions and through many translations, discourses still, though 
blind, with youthful enthusiasm in classic Latin on the bearings of 
medicine. Sir Richard Owen, at the venerable age of an octo- 
genarian, evinces still with freshness of mind a keen and joyful 
interest in comparative zoography, of which he is one of the main 
originators. A coétanean of his through the century, George 
Bentham, continued like Sir William Figen after four scores ee 
years still brisk in descriptive taxonomy for the plants of the 
world—engagements of severity, from which many a young 
worker even would shrink ; the watching of discoveries in their 
speciality were to them a never-ceasing fountain of delight, a 
necessity for their intellectual existence.. When Haydn, the 
predecessor of Mozart and Beethoven in composing symphonies, 
heard with great splendour the performance of his oratorio, the 
“Creation,” one of his last works, he burst into tears at the 
passage, “It became light,” and uttered in deepest emotion the 
words, “It is not from me, it is Divine inspiration.” The 
vibrations of the Eiffel-tower, the new structure, doubly as high 
as the Strassburg-spire, were attentively studied by Chevreul at 
an age of his more than that of a centenarian. 
Grand and true discoveries, such as may more and more also 
here be effected, are not, like meteors, flashing brilliantly but 
ephemerously across the sky ; they are like the discerning of new 
stars of lasting radiancy; and there is one mighty incitation, 
inasmuch as every achievement through progressive thought stamps 
on it the name of the discoverer for all times, and as any single 
new achievement may have numbers of others in its sequence. 
Let it be instanced, what since Galvani’s time has been 
brought about, until with lightning’s speed electric messages are 
now dashing in all directions through the world. It would be 
invidious to single out anyone connected with this glorious 
progress for special praise, unless-the Nestor of electrology, who 
in co-operation with Gauss fully fifty years ago issued the atlas 
of terrestrial magnetism, and still some years earlier made one of 
the first efforts to span electric wires over wide distances. 
What long ago was surmised by Faraday, and later on through 
calculations by Maxwell, has in the course of 1889 been proved 
by Professor H. Hertz, of Karlsruhe, from real experiments, that 
the action of the electric current on the medium, through which 
it is carried, is the same as that produced by light ; further, that 
the generation of both depends on the same laws, and that the 
propulsion is effected at the same velocity. The objectionable 
hypothesis of “action into distance,” which Weber already 
wished to avoid with regard to gravitation, is overthrown by 
these new demonstrations. 
