ADDRESS. 5 



science, the feeling of thankfulness that we have lived in an age which 

 has witnessed an advance in our knowledge of nature, and a consequent 

 improvement in the physical and, let us trust, also in the moral and 

 intellectual well-being of the people hitherto unknown ; an age with 

 which the name of Victoria will ever be associated. 



To give even a sketch of this progress, to trace even in the merest 

 outline the salient points of the general history of science during the 

 fifty momentous years of her Majesty's reign, is a task far beyond my 

 limited powers. It must suffice for me to point out to you, to the best 

 of my ability, some few of the steps of that progress as evidenced in 

 the one branch of science with which I am most familiar, and with which 

 I am more closely concerned, the science of chemistry. 



In the year 1837 chemistry was a very different science from that 

 existing at the present moment. Priestley, it is true, had discovered 

 oxygen, Lavoisier had placed the phenomena of combustion on their true 

 basis, Davy had decomposed the alkalis, Faraday had liquefied many of 

 the gases, Dalton had enunciated the laws of chemical combination by 

 weight, and Gay Lussac had pointed out the fact that a simple volumetric 

 relation governs the combination of the gases. But we then possessed no 

 knowledge of chemical dynamics, we were then altogether unable to 

 explain the meaning of the heat given off in the act of chemical combina- 

 tion. The atomic theory was indeed accepted, but we were as ignorant 

 of the mode of action of the atoms and as incapable of explaining their 

 mutual relationship as wei'e the ancient Greek philosophers. Fifty years 

 ago, too, the connection existing between the laws of life, vegetable and 

 animal, and the phenomena of inorganic chemistry, was ill understood. 

 The idea that the functions of living beings are controlled by the same 

 forces, chemical and physical, which regulate the changes occurring in 

 the inanimate world, was then one held by only a vei'y few of the foremost 

 thinkers of the time. Vital force was a term in everyone's mouth, an 

 expi'ession useful, as Goethe says, to disguise our ignorance, for 



Wo die Begriffe fehlen, 

 Da stellt ein Wort zur rechten Zeit sich ein. 



Indeed the pioneer of the chemistry of life, Liebig himself, cannot quito 

 shake himself free from the bonds of orthodox opinion, and he who first 

 placed the phenomena of life on a true basis cannot trust his chemical 

 principles to conduct the affairs of the body, but makes an appeal to vital 

 force to help him out of his difficulties ; as when in the body politic an 

 unruly mob requires the presence and action of physical force to restrain 

 it and to bring its members under the saving influence of law and order, so 

 too, according to Liebig's views, in the body corporeal a continual conflict 

 between the chemical forces and the vital power occurs throughout life, 

 in which the latter, when it prevails, insures health and a continuance of 

 life, but of which defeat insures disease or death. The picture presented 

 to the student of to-day is a very different one. We now believe that no 



