President's Address. 15 



which have ever a tendency to beget a feeling akin to 

 thoughtful sadness. Indeed, this may be said of all per- 

 sistent, hard, earnest, intellectual work. So that when Albert 

 Diirer painted his " Melancholia " in the midst of the instru- 

 ments and symbols of science, he gave grand expression to 

 this thought as regards our life-work. It is something, then, 

 to find a field of inquiry in which we not only meet with 

 much knowledge true to nature, but once and again also with 

 incidents which compel a smile, or even a hearty laugh, 

 not generally, however, at but with these men of the olden 

 time. Society is, unhappily, so constituted that science 

 may only expect from it what, with few exceptions, is all 

 it has hitherto got — a crust of bread. Thus our pleasure, 

 when in our pursuits we find that science itself can some- 

 times (excuse the remark) butter the crust ! Take an in- 

 stance. AVhen James IV. set up furnaces in Edinburgh to 

 search for the Philosopher's Stone, he associated with him a 

 Frenchman, Dr Damian. As we read and inquire, we come 

 on Damian in a new relation, and I had almost said a physical 

 plight. He had made it plain, a priori (to himself, at least), 

 that man, had he wings, might fly; and so, having made himself 

 wings, he struck boldly out from the w^alls of Stirling Castle in 

 the eyes of a crowd. Bishop Leslie gives the result, — "He brak 

 his thee bane." " The weyt thairof he ascryvit to that thair 

 was sum hen fedderis in his wings, quhilk yarnit and covit 

 the mydding and not the skyis." About the best comment, 

 I think, on this, is the fact that his royal master afterwards, as 

 a solatiuyn, created him Abbot of Tongland ! Again, in such a 

 sketch of geological progress, w^e would have to pass from the 

 work of the alchemists to the pages of Bishop Leslie, in which, 

 for the first time, we find the description of some surface 

 deposits, coupled with a theory of their origin, and then to 

 the writings of Sibbald, but would meet with little in our 

 survey worth lingering over till 1785, when, in Hutton's great 

 work, the proposition was laid down wdiich served as the 

 foundation for the Scottish School of Geology — " No powers," 

 says Hutton, " are to be employed \i.c., to account for present 

 phenomena] that are not natural to the globe ; no actions are 

 to be admitted, except those of which we know the principle." 



