8 DR. ARRHENIUS. 



will forgive in a son of Cambridge a momentary excess 

 of emotion, if not of statement ; and if you think I have 

 exaggerated the fame of my own University, you will at 

 all events agree that I have not exaggerated the merits 

 of the man to whom we have met to do honour. For 

 he was a man whose performances have become part 

 of the common intellectual heritage of mankind, through 

 whose ideas we look at every problem, not merely those 

 connected with the lower organisms, but those connected with 

 society, as an evolutionary question ; and he was above all a 

 man whose heroic disposition and whose lovable qualities 

 would, even if he had not otherwise gained that immortal niche 

 in the temple of fame, still commend him to every man who 

 either knew him personally, or who by tradition has been 

 able to form some estimate of the rare qualities which he 

 exhibited. There is another speech to be delivered on this 

 great theme by one incomparably more qualified than I can 

 pretend to be to deal with Charles Darwin on the scientific 

 side, and I will leave to him the grateful task of asking 

 you to drink to the memory of Charles Darwin. 



DR. SVANTE ARRHENIUS said : Chancellor, your Excel- 

 lencies, my Lords and Gentlemen, Evolutional ideas are as old 

 as human civilisation. We find traces of them in old Egyptian 

 legends of the growth of mankind, in Hindoo myths as well as 

 in the cosmogony of Hesiod, and in Ovid's " Metamorphoses." 

 During the lapse of centuries they were developed by philoso- 

 phers and astronomers, and in the i8th century, when most 

 modern sciences took a distinct shape, those ideas formed im- 

 portant parts of the scientific work of Kant, and still more in 

 the admirable theoretical speculations of Lamarck. But still, 

 the finalist school, founded on primitive and mediaeval con- 

 siderations, was in the highest degree preponderant, and the 

 leading biologist at the end of that century, Cuvier, had no 

 conception of evolutionism. Even in Kant's works we find 

 the finalistic idea prevailing. 



To bring about the now prevailing evolutionary ideas a 

 great work was necessary, in order that these should be 

 developed into a system embracing all the biological sciences 

 with the strictest logic and the severest criticism. The 



