2 Literary and Philosophical Society. 



scarcely conversant with the world around them. But it 

 will not be difficult to show that these opinions are far 

 from being correct, that thoughts have gone out from this 

 society piercing far into the future, and that some have 

 been sent here by nature from distant space ; and that 

 instead of neglecting the world around them our members 

 have been keen in detecting its requirements, and some of 

 them far-sighted beyond the rest of men in seeing improve- 

 ments. We have paid of late little attention to the his- 

 toric past ; our past has been chiefly in geological eras. 



We must not be considered arrogant if we claim for 

 our members to have finished two great stages of a course 

 of thought with which the world long toiled, begun east 

 of Greece and keenly contested and grown old, although 

 unsettled in the times when the Greek intellect was most 

 powerful ; and more than that, to have carried it beyond the 

 farthest point which by them was seen or hoped for. We 

 allude to questions regarding the constitution of matter, 

 which is now generally considered proved to consist of 

 definite particles forming at least one stage of existence, 

 although it may be that these particles themselves are 

 differently formed, leading us to the still unsettled portion 

 of the atomic theory, a division unknown to the ancients. 

 We have finished one part, we have cleared the ground for 

 discussing the other. One of our members may be said to 

 have established the great science of chemistry on this basis 

 of the atom. He carried our thoughts beyond the stage of 

 definite volume and went to the immediate consequences of 

 its existence, namely constancy and exactness of composition 

 in chemical substances, and we may say in all matter. 



Another of our members has led the world from atomic 

 equivalents in chemical combinations to the equivalents of 



