MR. BALFOUR. 



our University, and perhaps the greatest man the world 

 has ever seen. Is it not true that the greatest scientific 

 minds of the igth century were largely occupied with 

 another allied set of problems, those connected with the 

 character of the ether and the energies of which ether is the 

 vehicle ; and that in Cambridge we may claim to have 

 educated Young, Kelvin, Maxwell, Stokes I do not carry 

 the catalogue into the realm of the living men whose- 

 names will for ever be associated with that vast expansion of 

 our knowledge of the material universe, associated with the 

 theory of the ether, the theory of electricity, of light and that 

 great group of allied subjects. If we have not in that: 

 department a clear and undoubted lead, which Cambridge men 

 may surely claim that Newton gave in another department, at 

 least we have borne our fair share, and more than our fair 

 share, of the heat and burden of scientific investigation. 

 And we are now occupied with pardonable pride in turning our 

 attention to one who in another wholly different sphere of 

 scientific investigation has for all time imprinted in unmis- 

 takable lines his unmistakable signature upon the whole- 

 development of future thought. I do not wish to exaggerate 

 on such an occasion, because of all crimes Charles Darwin 

 would have disliked exaggeration in anything connected 

 with science, and most of all in anything connected 

 with his own claims. Yet the fact remains that Charles 

 Darwin has become part of the common intellectual 

 heritage of every man of education, wheresoever he may 

 live, or whatsoever be his occupation in life. The fact 

 remains that we trace, perhaps not to him alone, but 

 to him in the main, a view which has affected not merely 

 our ideas of the development of living organisms, but 

 ideas of politics, ideas upon sociology, ideas which cover trie- 

 whole domain of human terrestrial activity. He is the fount, 

 he is the origin, and he will stand to all time as the man 

 who made this great as I think beneficent revolution 

 in the mode in which educated mankind conceive the 

 history, not merely of their own institutions, not merely of 

 their own race, but of everything which has that unexplained 

 attribute of life, everything which lives on the surface of the 



