10 CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF THE ACADEMY. 



behold, encircling this Academy as their original nucleus, their primal nebula, if I 

 may so speak, — a Natural History Society, with its manifold and growing collec- 

 tions and cabinets: a Technological Institute, with its admirable curriculum of 



scientific education ; a splendid Museum of the Fine Arts ; an Observatory, with its 

 comet-seekers and transit instruments, and with its noble refractor; the Lawrence 

 Scientific School ; the Chemical Laboratory of Professor Cooke ; the Garden and 

 Herbarium of our great botanist, Dr. Gray; the magnificent Agassiz Museum of 

 Comparative Zoology, where an accomplished son is so nobly carrying on the cher- 

 ished work of his ever-honored and lamented father, and, close at its side, the 

 Peabody Museum of Archceology and Ethnology ; and all our thriving associations 

 of History and Literature and Music, of Horticulture and Agriculture ; and, better 

 than all, the hosts of busy and devoted students in these and other institutions, 

 who are engaged, day by day and night by night, in searching out the mysteries of 

 Nature, and extorting from her so many of the secrets which have been hid from 

 all human eyes and all human conceptions from the foundation of the world ! 



They would be convinced that there was, indeed, such a process as Evolution, 

 though I think they would be content, as some of their descendants still are, to 

 call it by the good old-fashioned name of development. They would certainly concur 

 in the idea that their little Academy had furnished, or fallen upon, a plentiful supply 

 of protoplasm, though I have great faith that they would cling tenaciously to the 

 simpler and more euphonious word — germ. At all events, they would be heard 

 exclaiming with one accord, in the sublime words with which our first President 

 concluded his inaugural discourse a hundred years ago, " Great and marvellous are 

 thy works, Lord God Almighty, in wisdom hast thou made them all ! " 



And with these words I, too, must be allowed to close this attempt — from which 

 I would so gladly have been excused — to fill a gap which was not dreamed of until 



tte hour of yesterday, and to deliver a centennial oration at less than twenty-four 



irs' notice. If I have thus exhibited my reverence for the memory of our first 

 President, and my loyalty to the Academy in its hour of need, and if I have rendered 

 the lamented absence of my honored friend, Mr. Adams, less painful to himself as 

 well as to you, I shall be more than rewarded for the effort. I should be sorry, how- 

 ever, to be involved in such an emergency again, at least before the expiration of 

 another full hundred years! 



ho 



Brief addresses were then made as follows 



