ADDRESS. 5 
and smoky torches, for no lamps lit the ways. By day the light of the 
sun struggled into the houses through narrow panes of blurred glass. 
Though the town then, as now, was one of the chief portals to and from 
the countries beyond the seas, the means of travel were scanty and dear, 
available for the most part to the rich alone, and, for all, beset with dis- 
comfort and risk. Slow and uncertain was the carriage of goods, and the 
news of the world outside came to the town—though it from its position 
learnt more than most towns—tardily, fitfully, and often falsely. The 
people of Dover sat then much in dimness, if not in darkness, and lived 
in large measure on themselves. They who study the phenomena of living 
beings tell us that light is the great stimulus of life, and that the fulness 
of the life of a being or of any of its members may be measured by the 
variety, the swiftness, and the certainty of the means by which it is in 
touch with its surroundings. Judged from this standpoint life at Dover 
then, as indeed elsewhere, must have fallen far short of the life of to-day. 
The same study of living beings, however, teaches us that while from 
one point of view the environment seems to mould the organism, from 
another point the organism seems to be master of its environment. Going 
behind the change of circumstances, we may raise the question, the old 
question, Was life in its essence worth more then than now? Has there 
been a real advance ? 
Let me at once relieve your minds by saying that I propose to leave 
this question in the main unanswered. It may be, or it may not be, that 
man’s grasp of the beautiful and of the good, if not looser, is not firmer 
than it was a hundred years ago. It may be, or it may not be, that man 
is no nearer to absolute truth, to seeing things as they really are, than he 
was then. I will merely ask you to consider with me for a few minutes 
how far, and in what ways, man’s laying hold of that aspect of or part of 
truth which we call natural knowledge, or sometimes science, differed in 
1799 from what it is to-day, and whether that change must not be 
accounted a real advance, a real improvement in man. 
I do not propose to weary you by what in my hands would be the rash 
effort of attempting a survey of all the scientific results of the nineteenth 
century. It will be enough if for a little while I dwell on some few of 
the salient features distinguishing the way in which we nowadays look upon, 
and during the coming week shall speak of, the works of Nature around 
us—though those works themselves, save for the slight shifting involved in 
a secular change, remain exactly the same—from the way in which they 
were looked upon and might have been spoken of at a gathering of 
philosophers at Dover in 1799. And I ask your leave to do so. 
In the philosophy of the ancients, earth, fire, air, and water were 
called ‘the elements.’ It was thought, and rightly thought, that a know- 
ledge of them and of their attributes was a necessary basis of a knowledge 
of the ways of Nature. Translated into modern language, a knowledge of 
