8C4 REPORT— 1900. 



directly as the mass, and Inversely as tbe square of the distance, vre have laid 

 before the world once and for all time a sure and certain guide to all the 

 phenomena of nature. 



He reveals to us distances incomprehensible, and magnitudes which transcend 

 the most fanciful ideas of his predecessors, and flowing from this we have esta- 

 blished the important conclusion that as far as matter is concerned, whether in the 

 case of our own planet, in the sun, in the mighty orbs of Jupiter and Saturn, or in 

 the distant nebulae and stellar masses, the whole is governed by exact law, and is 

 not a fortuitous concourse of atoms, or the result of some unexplained and inex- 

 plicable vortex motion. 



"We may say of him in the words which I have above quoted from Lucretius, 

 ' the living force of his soul gained the day : on he passed far beyond the flaming 

 walls of the world and traversed throughout in mind and spirit the immeasurable 

 universe ; whence he returns a conqueror to tell us what can, what cannot come 

 into being ; in short on what principle each thing has its powers defined, its deep- 

 set boundary mark.' 



"We must now turn to the contemplation of a great thinker who, although not 

 a scientific man, has yet had the most profound influence in the direction of clear 

 reasoning of perhaps any man in England since the time of Bacon. I allude to the 

 illustrious John Locke, the friend of Newton, of Boyle, of Monmouth, of Somers, 

 of Clarke, of Montagu, of Pembroke, and of Shaftesbury, admired ahke by Horace 

 "Walpole and by Voltaire, and the trusted friend and councillorof William of Orange, 



Intimately connected with the freedom of the press and the currency of this 

 country, one of the first commissioners for trade and the colonies, he is princi- 

 pally distinguished by his charming essay on 'The Human Understanding.' 



Putting aside the metaphysical conception of Descartes, he lays down the law 

 that all our knowledge must be founded on two principles, experience of the outer 

 world through our senses, which he calls ' sensation,' and the inner working of the 

 mind on the experience so gained, which he calls * reflection.' 



To his clear and lucid English which appeals to every reader, taken in conjunc- 

 tion with the simple facts which he enunciates, the English nation is indebted for 

 much of that common sense and freedom from fanciful speculation for which we 

 are distinguished among the nations of the world. 



At the end of the seventeenth century Boyle, Hooke, and many others of their 

 illustrious contemporaries were, in the early days of the Royal Society, founding 

 that school of physics and chemistry which, taking the place of the alchemy and 

 the magic of the middle ages, was being gradually moulded into shape in accord- 

 ance with true induction and in a scientific spirit. But little had yet been done in 

 the study of the earth itself. 



Pliny mentions the fact that fossil shells had been found ; and Leonardo da 

 Vinci, about the beginning of the sixteenth century, had argued that these fossils 

 were the remains of extinct beings, and not lusits naturce formed by the action of 

 the stars on the plastic substance of the earth ; nor, as taught by the Church, 

 shells dropped from the hats of pilgrims on their way I'rom the Holy Land. 



And even at the end of the eighteenth century Johnson spoke, as it will be 

 remembered, of people engaged in such a study as ' fossilists.' 



"\i\''e are indebted, however, for right thinking on truly scientific lines to 

 Hutton, to Playfair, to "Werner, and to Cuvier, who about the end of the 

 eighteenth century began to formulate distinct and clear conceptions on the 

 subject. 



The rocks of which the earth's crust was composed were gradually being 

 divided into aqueous, pliitonic, and metamorphic. 



It was clearly established that among the aqueous deposits the various strata 

 contained fossils different both in kind and in species from those of living beings. 



To our illustrious countryman "William Smith we are indebted for the first 

 geological map of Central and Northern England. 



Controversies arose as to how the great succession of events which accurate 

 inquiry was unfolding to our knowledge was produced : whether upheavals and 

 depressions in the earth's crust were due to sudden cataclysms, dividing and 



