PROGRESS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 503 



pity was born, and how young and impotent pity is still, we may 

 well wonder whether we have yet learned much of omnipotence. 

 Yet how superb is the conception of the procession of life, never 

 halting in its march through the corridors of time. These are great 

 acquisitions by which our science has enriched human thought, and 

 it behooves us to occupy as often as possible the point of view to 

 which they carry us. 



It has not appeared desirable to give place in this address to 

 special problems, because they will receive due attention in the 

 addresses that are to follow under the eight headings allotted to our 

 Department. And besides, it would be impossible even in the whole 

 of an address to do justice to the great body of work that includes 

 not only the establishment of the great age of the earth, and the 

 continuity of ordinary orderly process, inorganic and organic, but 

 a flood of lesser results: the penetration of all the lands, except 

 those of the polar caps, the sounding of the oceans, the refined 

 analysis of the atmosphere, the optical study of rocks, the discovery 

 of glacial epochs in the past, the measurement of tremors that have 

 passed through the body of the earth, and countless others. 



I have therefore sought to consider only the prospect from the 

 point of view to which the progress of a hundred years has led us. 

 Vast as is the expanse over which we look, innumerable as are the 

 elements of the view, the chief impression that we gain is one of 

 well-ordered interaction in the continuous progress of events, all 

 of whose momentary geographic phases with all their parts of 

 earth, air, water, and responding life are spread upon successive 

 pages in the great volume of geological records. 



