THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LONDON 



giving the world a marvellous insight into the consti- 

 tution of the universe; and Hutton, who for the first 

 time gains a clear view of the architecture of our 

 earth's crust; and Jenner, who is rescuing his fellow- 

 men from the clutches of the most deadly of plagues ; 

 to say nothing of such titanic striplings as Young and 

 Davy, who are just entering the scientific lists. With 

 such a company about us we are surely justified in 

 feeling that the glory of England as a scientific centre 

 has not dimmed in these first hundred and thirty years 

 of the Royal Society's existence. 



And now, as we view the radiometer, the scene 

 shifts by yet another century, and we come out of 

 cloud-land and into our own proper age. We are at 

 the close of the nineteenth century no, I forget, we 

 are fairly entering upon the twentieth. Need I say 

 that these again are troublous times ? Man still wages 

 warfare on his fellow -man as he has done time out of 

 mind; as he will do who shall say how long? But 

 meantime, as of yore, the men of science have kept 

 steadily on their course. But recently here at the 

 Royal Society were seen the familiar figures of Dar- 

 win and Lyell and Huxley and Tyndall. Nor need we 

 shun any comparison with the past while the present 

 lists can show such names as Wallace, Kelvin, Lister, 

 Crookes, Foster, Evans, Rayleigh, Ramsay, and Lock- 

 yer. What revolutionary advances these names con- 

 note! How little did those great men of the closing 

 decades of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 

 know of the momentous truths of organic evolution 

 for which the names of Darwin and Wallace and Hux- 

 ley stand! How little did they know a century ago, 



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