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their full extent, we must take into the account not only the direct 

 but also the indirect results to which it has led ; and I trust that I 

 may be excused if, on the occasion of the present anniversary, I oc- 

 cupy some portion of your time, not by an elaborate discussion of 

 the subject, but by offering to you some suggestions as to the other 

 ways in which inquiries such as those in which you are yourselves 

 engaged have already affected, and may be expected still more to 

 affect hereafter, the habits, the modes of thought, the fortunes and 

 moral condition of mankind. 



It is not our business to depreciate that form of civilization which 

 existed in times long since past, and especially of that remarkable 

 people who during some centuries before and after the Christian sera 

 were distinguished for their still unrivalled excellence in art, their 

 noble literature, when Aristotle sat at the feet of his master Plato, 

 when students in search of intellectual improvement from all parts 

 of Greece resorted to the Lyceum of Athens, when from opposite 

 quarters of the Mediterranean Sea the Greek colonies of Alexandria 

 and Syracuse supplied a list of mathematicians and poets to add 

 lustre to their parent state. Neither let us forget what we owe to 

 another people, whose civilization is to be measured, not by their 

 wealth and luxury, their ambition and their conquests, but by those 

 monuments of art which still draw visitors to Rome, their historians, 

 moral philosophers, and poets. But, great as are the obligations 

 which we owe to these nations of antiquity, it cannot be denied that 

 the civilization which exists among us at the present time is of a 

 higher order than that which existed formerly : and it is not difficult 

 to show that it is to the greater extension of a knowledge of natural 

 phenomena, and the laws which govern them, that this improvement 

 is mainly to be attributed. 



Knowledge and wisdom are indeed not identical ; and every man's 

 experience must have taught him that there may be much know- 

 ledge with little wisdom, and much wisdom with little knowledge. 

 But with imperfect knowledge it is difficult or impossible to arrive 

 at right conclusions. Many of the vices, many of the miseries, 

 many of the follies and absurdities by which human society has been 

 infested and disgraced may be traced to a want of knowledge. It was 

 from a want of knowledge that Roger Bacon was persecuted by the 

 Franciscan monks, and Galileo by the Inquisition ; that Servetus was 



VOL. X. N 



