28 REPORT—1885. 
They were removers of abuses, but were confined within the circles of 
their own beliefs. Newton’s discovery cast men’s minds into an entirely 
new mould, and levelled many barriers to human progress. This intel- 
lectual resnlt was vastly more important than the practical advantages 
of the discovery. It is true that navigation and commerce mightily 
benefited by our better knowledge of the motions of the heavenly bodies. 
Still, these benefits to humanity are incomparably less in the history of 
progress than the expansion of the human intellect which followed the 
withdrawal of the cramps that confined it. Truth was now able to 
discard authority, and marched forward without hindrance. Before this 
point was reached Bruno had been burned, Galileo had abjured, and both 
Copernicus and Descartes had kept back their writings for fear of offend- 
ing the Church. 
The recent acceptance of evolution in biology has had a like effect in 
producing a far profounder intellectual change in human thought than 
any mere impulse of industrial development. Already its application to 
sociology and education is recognised, but that is of less import to human 
progress than the broadening of our views of Nature. 
Abstract discovery in science is then the true foundation upon which 
the superstructure of modern civilisation is built; and the man who 
would take part in it should study science, and, if he can, advance it for 
its own sake and not for its applications. Ignorance may walkin the path 
lighted by advancing knowledge, but she is unable to follow when science 
passes her; for, like the foolish virgin, she has no oil in her lamp. 
An established truth in science is like the constitution of an atom in 
matter—something so fixed in the order of things that it has become 
independent of further dangers in the struggle for existence. The sum 
of such truths forms the intellectual treasure which descends to each 
generation in hereditary succession. Though the discoverer of a new 
truth is a benefactor to humanity, he can give little to futurity in com- 
parison with the wealth of knowledge which he inherited from the past. 
We, in our gencration, should appreciate and use our great possessions— 
For me your tributary stores cembine, 
Creation’s heir; the world, the world is mine. 
