98 Annals of the Philosophical Club 



century. When I was born, the application of steam to 

 locomotives had only just got beyond the experimental 

 stage ; * large areas of Africa were still blank on our maps, 

 while the fauna and flora of several other parts of the world 

 were very imperfectly known, and the annals of even the 

 greater nations, prior to some four and twenty centuries 

 ago, were largely blended with legend. Since the Club 

 was founded history has been carried back into a past far 

 more remote than was on record in our books. The monu- 

 ments in the Mesopotamian and adjacent regions have 

 been unearthed 2 and the languages of their builders 

 deciphered and interpreted ; the relics of Minoan ages have 

 proved the existence of a great pre-Hellenic civilization ; 

 the mists have almost vanished from the early history of 

 Egypt, and kings been shown to have reigned before the 

 once semi-mythical Menes. The application of the micro- 

 scope to the study of rocks has done wonders for petrology. 

 Evolution, from a conjecture, has been recognized as a 

 process of the highest and far-reaching importance, 3 and 

 researches in Chemical Physics have revolutionized our 

 conceptions of matter, ether, and energy. In one or other 

 of these great advances, the men who joined in the con- 

 versations at the table of the Philosophical Club took an 

 active part. It is much to have lived through such a 

 wonderful epoch ! 



But these records also show, if I may venture to say it, 

 that such great gains are not without some loss. The 

 men of science of that earlier time had wider interests and 

 more varied knowledge than is possible, as a rule, for their 

 successors. At the present day students of science are in 

 danger of being fettered by the multiplicity of details, often 

 comparatively unimportant, and being over-burdened by 

 the ' literature of the subject,' now a hundredfold greater 



1 The Liverpool and Manchester railway was opened September I5th, 

 1830. 



* Strictly speaking, digging had begun before the Club was founded, but 

 it was in the same decade. 



8 The Origin of Species was published in the autumn of 1859. 



