ANNUAL ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT, 
JAMES C. WELLING. 
Delivered December 6, 1884. 
THE ATOMIC PHILOSOPHY, PHYSICAL AND META- 
_ PHYSICAL. 
Every nation under the sun has a philosophy of some kind, but 
the philosophy we profess draws the lines of its historic traditions, 
if not its “increasing purpose,” from the home of our Aryan an- 
cestors in Greece. It was here that the typical forms of our litera- 
ture were invented, that the art of sculpture was carried to its 
climax, and that the architecture of the lintel came to a transfigu- 
ration in the Theseum and the Parthenon. And as if all these 
glories were not enough, it is the further good fortune of the 
Greeks to have at least opened up the great leading problems of 
human enquiry, in physics, in psychology, and in ethics; and to 
have so opened them up at the starting point of the world’s Torch- 
race, that the light shed on these questions more than twenty-five 
centuries ago is still a matter of curious retrospection to this 
generation of ours on whom the ends of the world are come. 
It is to one of the oldest of the formal physical philosophies ever 
framed by the mind of man for the explanation of the mechanical 
structure of the Universe that I purpose to call your attention to- 
night—a theory the most comprehensive in its scope, and, at the 
same time, the most searching in its subtility, which has been 
handed down to us by all antiquity—a theory which in its ingenuity 
represents the synthetic power of the Greek mind at the highest stage 
of its physical speculation—a theory which the literature of Rome 
has preserved in the amber of Cicero’s philosophical disquisition, 
and embalmed in the immortal verse of Lucretius—a theory, in fine, 
which has survived the old dialectic in which it was first conceived, 
because it has come to a new birth in the forms of modern science. 
I refer to what is known in history as the Atomic Philosophy of the 
Greeks. 
p.@.G 0. ¢ 
