ADDRESS. 18 
and all their ancestors came into existence at one stroke when the first- 
born progenitor of the race, within which all the rest were folded up, 
stood forth as the result of a creative act. We may fancy him listening to 
a debate between the philosopher who maintained that all the fossils strewn 
in the earth were the remains of animals or plants churned up in the 
turmoil of a violent universal flood, and dropped in their places as the 
waters went away, and him who argued that such were not really the 
‘spoils of living creatures,’ but the products of some playful plastic 
power which out of the superabundance of its energy fashioned here 
and there the lifeless earth into forms which imitated, but only imitated, 
those of living things. Could he amid such surroundings by any flight 
of genius have beat his way to the conception for which his name will ever 
be known ? 
Here I may well turn away from the past. It is not my purpose, nor, 
as I have said, am I fitted, nor is this perhaps the place, to tell even in 
outline the tale of the work of science in the nineteenth century. Iam 
content to have pointed out that the two great sciences of chemistry and 
geology took their birth, or at least began to stand alone, at the close of 
the last century, and have grown to be what we know them now within 
about a hundred years, and that the study of living beings has within 
the same time been so transformed as to be to-day something wholly 
different from what it was in 1799. And, indeed, to say more would be 
to repeat almost the same story about other things. If our present know- 
ledge of electricity is essentially the child of the nineteenth century, so 
also is our present knowledge of many other branches of physics. And 
those most ancient forms of exact knowledge, the knowledge of numbers 
and of the heavens, whose beginning is lost in the remote past, have, with 
all other kinds of natural knowledge, moved onward during the whole of 
the hundred years with a speed which is ever increasing. I have said, I 
trust, enough to justify the statement that in respect to natural knowledge 
a great gulf lies between 1799 and 1899. That gulf, moreover, is a two- 
fold one: not only has natural knowledge been increased, but men have 
run to and fro spreading it as they go. Not only have the few driven 
far back round the full circle of natural knowledge the dark clouds of the 
unknown which wrap us all about, but also the many walk in the zone of 
light thus increasingly gained. If it be true that the few to-day are, in re- 
spect to natural knowledge, far removed from the few of those days, it is also 
true that nearly all which the few alone knew then, and much which even 
they did not know, has now become the common knowledge of the many. 
What, however, I may venture to insist upon here is that the difference 
in respect to natural knowledge, whatever be the case with other differ- 
ences between then and now, is undoubtedly a difference which means 
progress. The span between the science of that time and the science of 
to-day is beyond all question a great stride onwards, 
