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 o society." These words of Helm - 

 holtz sre, 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 

 problem of physical science would be already half solved. 

 I3ut 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 



