PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 487 
discontinuity between living and non-living matter in no way diminishes 
the value of his work. The broad philosophic mind of the great master 
of inductive method saw too fully the nature of the task he had set before 
him to hamper himself with irrelevant views as to origins. 
No well instructed person imagines that Darwin spoke either the first 
or the last word about organic evolution. His ideas as to the precise mode 
of evolution may be, and are being, modified as time goes on. This is 
the fate of all scientific theories; none are stationary, none are final. 
The development of science is a continuous process of evolution, like the 
world of phenomena itself. It has, however, some few landmarks which 
stand out exceptional and prominent. None of these is greater or will be 
more enduring in the history of thought than the one associated with the 
name of Charles Darwin. 
I cannot, indeed, attempt to weigh or estimate the influence and the 
far-reaching import of the work which all the world has been weighing 
and estimating during this year, the centenary of his birth and the 
jubilee of the Origin of Species. I cannot, to my intense regret, give you 
any personal recollections of Darwin, for though I think I once saw him 
in the streets of Cambridge, I have to my sorrow never been absolutely 
sure that this was so. 
But in reading his writings and his son’s most admirable Life, one 
attains a very vivid impression of the man. One of his dominant 
characteristics was simplicity—simplicity and directness. In his style he 
was terse, but he managed to write so that even the most abstruse problems 
became clear to the public. The fascination of the story he had to tell 
was enhanced by the direct way he told it. 
One more characteristic. Darwin’s views excited at the time intense 
opposition and in many quarters intense hatred. They were criticised from 
every point of view, and seldom has a writer been more violently attacked 
and abused. Now what seemed to me so wonderful in Darwin was that— 
at any rate as far as we can know—he took both criticism and abuse with 
mild serenity. What he wanted to do was to find the truth, and he care- 
fully considered any criticism, and if it helped him to his goal he thanked 
the critic and used his new facts. He never wasted time in replying to 
those who fulminated against him; he passed them by and went on with 
his search. 
In the development of the theories associated with Darwin’s work the 
New World played a prominent part. Darwin’s ‘Wanderjahre’ were 
spent on this side of the Atlantic. The central doctrine of evolution 
through natural selection was forced upon his mind by the studies and 
researches he made in South America during the voyage of the Beagle. 
The numerous observations in all departments of natural science and the 
varied forms of life he came across in this classical journey were the bricks 
with which he built many of his later theories. The storm of controversy 
which the Origin of Species awoke was at least as violent in America as in 
Great Britain, and we must not forget the parts played by men like Hyatt, 
Fiske, Osborn, and many others, and above all by Asa Gray and by Brooks 
of Baltimore, whose recent death has robbed America of perhaps her 
greatest Darwinian. 
It is a somewhat remarkable fact that whilst the works of Darwin 
stimulated an immense amount of research in biology, this research did 
not at first take the line he himself had traced. With some exception the 
leading zoological work of the end of the last century took the form of 
embryology, morphology, and paleontology, and such subjects as cell- 
lineage, ‘ Entwickelungsmechanik’; the minute structure of protoplasm, 
life-histories, teratology, have occupied the minds of those who interest 
themselves in the problems of life. Along all these lines of research man 
has been seeking for the solution of that secret of nature which at the 
