MR. BALFOUR. 



globe, or even the depths of its oceans. After all Darwin was 

 the Newton of this great department of human research, and 

 to him we may look, as we look to Newton to measure 

 the heavens or to weigh suns and their attendant planets. 

 The branch of research which he has initiated is surely 

 the most difficult of all. I talk of measuring the 

 heavens and weighing suns; but those are tasks surely 

 incomparably easy compared with the problem which taxes 

 the physiologist, the morphologist, in dealing with the living 

 cell, be it of plant or be it of animal or man. That problem, 

 the problem of life, is the one which it is impossible for us to 

 evade, which it may be impossible for us ultimately to solve, 

 but in dealing with it in its larger manifestations Charles 

 Darwin made greater strides than any man in the history of 

 the world had made before him, or that any man so far has 

 made since that great anniversary of the publication of the 

 41 Origin of Species " which we have met this week to 

 celebrate. We have heard this morning, from lips far 

 more expert than mine, some estimate of the genius of 

 that great man in whose honour we have met, and I feel it 

 would be impertinent to add to anything which has been said. 

 One aspect, and one aspect alone, of Darwin's scientific 

 genius seems to me to be insufficiently appreciated, at all 

 events by the general public, of which I am one, and on 

 whose behalf I may be supposed to speak. I mean the great 

 achievement which Darwin made in science quite apart from 

 I may not say quite apart, but distinct from that 

 great generalisation with which his name is immortally con- 

 nected. Let us assume that Darwin was not the author of 

 the theory of the " Origin of Species " ; let us assume that the 

 great work which he did in connection with the ideas of the 

 evolution of human beings had never taken place. Would he 

 not still rank as one of the most remarkable investigators 

 whom we have ever seen ? I am, of course, not qualified 

 to speak as an expert upon this subject, but I appeal 

 to those and there are many in this room wno are experts. 

 Is it not true that quite apart from his theories of evolution, 

 that in zoology, in botany, in geology, in anthropology, in the 

 whole sphere of these great allied sciences, Charles Darwin 



