ADDRESS. 9 
passed away, when, in 1802, they found an able expositor in John Playfair. 
The very same year that Hutton published his theory, Cuvier came to 
Paris and almost forthwith began, with Brongniart, his immortal researches 
into the fossils of Paris and its neighbourhood. And four years later, in 
the year 1799 itself, William Smith’s tabular list of strata and fossils 
saw the light. It is, I believe, not too much to say that out of these 
geology, as we now know it, sprang. It was thus in the closing years of 
the eighteenth century that was begun the work which the nineteenth 
century has carried forward to such great results. But at that time only 
the select few had grasped the truth, and even they only the beginning of 
it. Outside.a narrow circle the thoughts, even of the educated, about the 
history of the globe were bounded by the story of the Deluge—though the 
story was often told in a strange fashion—or were guided by fantastic 
views of the plastic forces of a sportive Nature. 
In another branch of science, in that which deals with the problems 
presented by living beings, the thoughts of men in 1799 were also very 
different from the thoughts of men to-day. It is a very old quest, 
the quest after the knowledge of the nature of living beings, one of the 
earliest on which man set out ; for it promised to lead him toa knowledge 
of himself, a promise which perhaps is still before us, but the fulfilment 
of which is as yet far off. As time has gone on, the pursuit of natural 
knowledge has seemed to lead man away from himself into the further- 
most parts of the universe, and into secret workings of Nature in which 
he appears to be of little or no account ; and his knowledge of the nature 
of living things, and so of his own nature, has advanced slowly, waiting 
till the progress of other branches of natural knowledge can bring it aid. 
Yet in the past hundred years, the biologic sciences, as we now call them, 
have marched rapidly onward. 
We may look upon a living body as a machine doing work in accord- 
ance with certain laws, and may seek to trace out the working of the inner 
wheels, how these raise up the lifeless dust into living matter, and let the 
living matter fall away again into dust, giving rise to movement and heat. 
Or we may look upon the individual life as a link in a long chain, joining 
something which went before to something about to come, a chain whose 
beginning lies hid in the farthest past, and may seek -to know the ties 
which bind one life to another. As we call up to view the long series of 
living forms, living now or flitting like shadows on the screen of the past, 
we may strive to lay hold of the influences which fashion the garment of 
life. Whether the problems of life are looked upon from the one point 
of view or the other, we to-day, not biologists only, but all of us, have 
gained a knowledge hidden even from the philosophers a hundred years 
ago. 
Of the problems presented by the living body viewed as a machine, 
some may be spoken of as mechanical, others as physical, and yet others 
