610 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L. 
Canal possible, an entirely revolutionary work of man’s interfering hands. The 
‘Great Eastern,’ which could not be launched at first on account of her size— 
as a lad, I saw her sticking in the stocks—was a failure, because she was outside 
the fashion of her time, yet she has given rise to a host of ocean leviathans 
of far larger size; the steam-turbine has entered into rivalry with the recipro- 
cating steam-engine; cold storage has revolutionised ocean transport, so that 
fresh food can be carried from this continent to remote England and Europe. 
Electricity, then a puling infant, is grown to giant size; not only have we deep- 
sea telegraphy and mechanical speech in the form of the phonograph and tele- 
phone, but wireless communication, the electric light, electric transmission of 
power, electric tractioun—even the waterfalls of the world are tamed through the 
turbine and made subservient to our will for motive purposes or in the pro- 
duction of temperatures bordering on those of solar heat, by means of which too 
we can draw food for plants, at will, from our atmosphere by combining its 
constituents into the form of a fertiliser. The use of oil-fuel in the internal- 
combustion engine has been made possible and, in a few short years, the streets 
of London have been cleared of horse conveyances and crowded with motor- 
vehicles; such engines are coming into use everywhere and enable us successfully 
to perform the feat which Dedalus vainly attempted—we even talk of flying 
from New York to London, across the vast Atlantic, to spend the week-end. 
The cyanide process has been introduced into gold-mining and is enabling us to 
unearth a fabulous wealth; a vast array of gorgeous colours has been produced 
and Dame Nature so outwitted that we make indigo and madder out of the tar 
which in old days was put only upon fences; Pasteur’s work has made Listerism 
possible, so that nothing is now beyond the surgeon’s art and bacteriology is 
become the handmaid of preventive medicine and sanitary science; not only 
paper but an artificial silk is made from wood-pulp and the finest of scents 
are conjured out from all but waste materials. A multitude of other discoveries 
of practical value might be referred to. 
But there is a reverse side to the picture. At this very moment we realise 
with horror that whilst we have destructive forces at our disposal, unknown 
to pre-scientific generations, of a most terrible kind, our human nature is in 
no proportionate way subject to modification—nor is it likely that it ever will 
be—so that the desire to destroy grows less as the means grow greater. It will 
be my argument, indeed, throughout this Address, that Science is something 
apart—a cult which can influence but the few. 
Not so long ago, when scientific research was spoken of, the cry was always 
Cui bono? What’s the good of it all? Now, no one has the patience to listen 
to a recital of the benefits accruing to mankind from its operation; for all the 
achievements I have referred to are not the work of mere inventors but primarily 
the outcome of scientific discovery : thus our modern command of electricity is 
very largely traceable to the labours of the great philosopher Faraday, who 
worked in an ill-lighted and cramped laboratory in the Royai Institution in 
Albemarle Street, London, with no other object than that of contributing to the 
advancement of knowledge. 
Perhaps the greatest of all the scientific achievements of our time remains to 
be mentioned—the promulgation of the doctrine of Evolution by Charles Darwin. 
Few perhaps can realise what this means for mankind, the intellectual advance 
it constitutes—that through it we have at last acquired full intellectual freedom 
and the belief that it rests with ourselves alone rightly to order our lives; that 
by it all dogmas have been undermined. 
No one has stated this better than Oliver Wendell Holmes, in saying: ‘ If, 
for the Fall of Man, Science comes to substitute the Rise of Man, it means the 
utter disintegration of all the spiritual pessimisms which have been like a spasm 
in the heart and a cramp in the intellect of men for so many centuries.’ 
Let me say that Huxley did much to give credence to this same doctrine of 
EKvolution : on which account Australia may well feel proud that he visited her 
shores and of the use that he made of his opportunity; our visit is but the 
logical sequence of his and we are but come to emphasise his message. 
‘During the last three hundred years reason has been slowly but steadily 
destroying Christian mythology and exposing the pretensions of supernatural 
revelation.’ 
