Darwin- Wallace Celebration. 35 



Universities and Schools, to offer our respectful congratu- 

 lations to the Linnean Society on this great occasion, and 

 especially, Mr. President, to congratulate you on the just 

 pride you must feel in occupying an historic chair on a 

 memorable day. 



Sir WILLIAM THISELTON-DYER, K.C.M.G., F.R.S., F.L.S. : 



Mr. President, the Universities for which I have the 

 honour to speak include the most ancient in our country as 

 well as the youngest. But they are all animated with a 

 common sympathy in this celebration, and the reason is not 

 far to seek. It is the happy fortune of Universities to stand 

 withdrawn from the stress of ordinary life. They are the 

 depositories, in some sort indeed the guardians, of what is 

 most significant in the ideas of each successive time. They 

 can trace the relations of those ideas with the past ; they can 

 apply them fruitfully to the problems of the present ; they 

 can conjecture their possible development in the future. 



Fifty years ago this Society was privileged to be the 

 recipient of communications which contained as Helmholtz 

 has said "an essentially new creative thought." It would be 

 difficult to specify any field of academic study which it has 

 not influenced more or less, though perhaps in some cases 

 scarcely consciously. The presence of the representatives 

 for whom I speak, is a recognition of the profound change 

 which has been brought about in our outlook on the natural 

 world. Of the full measure of that change we are even now 

 not fully sensible. The end is not yet. 



Dr. "Wallace, with that splendid modesty of which we have 

 had a further proof to-day, has claimed for Darwin that he is 

 " the Newton of Natural History." Their graves lie side by 

 side at Westminster and the comparison is just. It is the 

 singular fortune of an illustrious University that of two of 

 its sons, one should have introduced a rational order into the 

 inorganic and the other into the organic world. Each great 

 generalisation is in fact the complement of the other, and 

 who can say that the future may not have in store for us 



D2 



