THE ROYAL SOCIETY AND THE STATE 



inner relations of things. On one central eminence, domin- 

 ating alike the past, the present, and the future, science 

 has for some years firmly entrenched herself the position 

 that through all the ages the cosmos has advanced, and 

 is still advancing, by a process of orderly evolution. In 

 the domain of the living the fact of progress by means of 

 evolution was finally established by our illustrious country- 

 men Darwin, and his prophet Huxley. In heredity and 

 variation, the great discovery of Mendel, in the hands 

 of one of our medallists of to-day, promises to bring the 

 biologist nearer to his main quest, the fundamental nature 

 of living things. In physics, only a few years ago Professor 

 J. J. Thomson took by storm the outworks of the central 

 citadel of Nature the chemical atom. His later brilliant 

 attacks, aided by the new artillery of radio-active radiations, 

 may be said to have carried the keep itself. This strong- 

 hold of matter was found to be a place of positive electrifi- 

 cation in which swarms of negative electrons are winging 

 their mazy rounds. Material mass gives place to the 

 electric mass of moving electric charges. On this view 

 the chemical elements, each with its individual properties, 

 but all falling into family groups according to a periodic 

 law, have their origin in differences in the number of the 

 electrons and in the figures of their giddy dances, whirling 

 within the atom. Material nature becomes simplified 

 into electricity and ether or, is it only ether ? Passing 

 from the atom to the heavens, within the memory of those 



living, science has taught us so to read sunbeams and star- 



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