PROFESSOR VIRCHOW AND EVOLUTION. 655 
ical prejudices, and could only utter their convictions 
under the penalty of injuring their social influence and 
usefulness. Germany has gone forward more courageously. 
She has cherished the trust, which has never been deceived, 
that complete truth carries with it the antidote against 
the bane and danger which follow in the train of half 
knowledge. A cheerfully laborious and temperate people 
a people morally strong can well afford to look truth 
full in the face. Nor are they to be ruined by the enun- 
ciation of one-sided theories, even when these may appear 
to threaten the bases of society." These words of lielmr 
holtz t:re, in my opinion, wiser and more applicable to the 
condition of Germany at the present moment than those 
which express the fears of Professor Virchow. It will be 
remembered that at the time of his lecture his chief anxie- 
ties were directed toward France; but France has since that 
time given ample evidence of her ability to crush, not only 
socialists, but anti-socialists, who would impose on her a 
yoke which she refuses to bear. 
In close connection with these utterances of Helmholtz, 
I place another utterance not less noble, which I trust was 
understood and appreciated by those to whom it was ad- 
dressed. " If," said the president of the British Association 
in his opening address in Dublin, " we could lay down be- 
forehand the precise limits of possible knowledge, the 
Eroblem of physical science would be already half solved, 
ut the question to which the scientific explorer has often to 
address himself is, not merely whether he is able to solve this 
or that problem; but whether he can so far unravel the 
tangled threads of the matter with which he has to deal, as 
to weave them into a definite problem at all. . . . If his eye 
seem dim, he must look steadfastly and with hope into the 
misty vision, until the very clouds wreathe themselves 
into definite forms. If his ear seem dull, he must listen 
patiently and with sympathetic trust to the intricate whis- 
perings of Nature the goddess, as she has been called, of 
a hundred voices until here and there he can pick out a 
few simple notes to which his own powers can resound. If, 
then, at a moment when he finds himself placed on a pin- 
nacle from which he is called upon to take a perspective 
survey of the range of science, and to tell us what 'he can 
see from his vantage ground; if at such a moment, after 
straining his gaze to the very verge of the horizon, and 
