PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 485 
offices—that of the Colonies. One could prolong the list, and one must at 
least mention the names of Louis Braille, the inventor of the Braille type 
for the blind, of Fanny Kemble and of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, before 
passing on to remind you that this year is also the centenary of Tennyson 
who, with Browning, formed the twin stars of poetry during the reign of 
Queen Victoria, and who from his intimate knowledge of natural history 
and his keen power of observation was essentially the poet of Darwinism. 
Of his long-life friend, born the same year, Edward Fitzgerald, the trans- 
lator—one feels almost inclined to say author—of Omar Khayyam, and of 
the gifted musician Mendelssohn there is no time to speak. 
On this side of the Atlantic, and yet not wholly on this side, for he 
spent five impressionable school years at Stoke Newington, we have that 
‘fantastic and romantic’ genius Edgar Allan Poe." Later he studied at 
West Point, where surely he must have been as incongruous a student as 
James Whistler himself. We have also that kindly, humorous physician 
Oliver Wendell Holmes, a nature ‘ sloping towards the southern side’ as 
Lowell has it. Amongst many recollections of literary men I cherish none 
more dearly than that I once entertained him in my Cambridge and once 
visited him in his. 
Three other names stand out. William Ewart Gladstone, that leader 
of men, a politician and a statesman capable more than most men at 
once of arousing the warmest affection of his followers and the bitterest 
hatred of those who went the other way. Cultured as he was and widely 
read, he had his limitations, and although his tenacious memory was 
stored with the humanities of all the ages, he was singularly devoid of 
any knowledge of science. If we may paraphrase the words of Lord Morley 
in his estimate of Gladstone’s writings, we would say that his place is not 
in science, ‘nor in critical history, but elsewhere.’ 
Abraham Lincoln, the greatest man born on this continent since the 
War of Independence, was some ten months older than Gladstone. Both 
men were great statesmen, both men were liberators; for we must not 
forget that in many minds the help Gladstone gave to Italy in her struggle 
for freedom and union remains the most enduring thing he achieved. 
Yet in externals how different! One the finished, cultured product of 
the most aristocratic of our public schools and the most ancient of our 
universities, the other little read in the classics or in medieval and 
ecclesiastical lore, yet deeply versed in the knowledge of men and how to 
sway them. Rugged, a little rough if you like, humorous and yet sad, 
eminently capable, a strong man, and at heart ‘a very perfect gentleman.’ 
On the same day, February 12th, upon which Lincoln first saw the light, 
was born at the ‘ Mount,’ Shrewsbury, a little child destined as he grew 
up to alter our conceptions of organic life perhaps more profoundly than 
any other man has ever altered them, and this not.only in the subjects 
he made his own, but in every department of human knowledge and 
thought. 
Being as I am a member of Charles Darwin’s own college, coming as I 
do straight from the celebration in which the whole world united to do 
his memory honour, it would seem meet that I should in this year of the 
centenary of his birth devote this address to a consideration of his life 
and of his work, and of such confirmation and modification of his theories 
as the work of the last fifty years has revealed. 
As to the man, I can but quote two estimates of his character, one by 
a college companion who lived on terms of close intimacy with Darwin 
* Poe lived from his eighth to his thirteenth year at the ‘Manor House 
School,’ Stoke Newington, at that time a village, now swallowed up by 
the metropolis. Poe described the place as he knew it, and his schoolmaster, 
Dr. Bransby, in William Wilson. 
