THE PRESIDENTS ADDRESS. 13 



in their stately beauty, looked down on the dazzled eyes of the be- 

 lieving Shepherds, 



A very large number of persons, members and non-members of 

 Scientific bodies, take an increasing interest in the result of Scientific 

 research, and would gladly become familiar with the alphabet of the 

 system. They are generally deterred by the new language proposed 

 to them as a condition of the desired knowledge. Ignorance of Greek, 

 a very common disease with the masses, is a terrible difficulty in the 

 very threshold ; and without the persevering student, who knows 

 nothing of the powers of that wondrously plastic tongue, has to 

 fatigue his memory with thousands of (to him) most unmeaning and 

 formidable compound terms. The variation of a vowel, the mistake 

 of 'a dipthong, being occasionally so fatal to accuracy as to send the 

 poor groper among the Infusoria into the startling company of Plesio- 

 sauria or Pachyderms. The Greek of Sophocles or ^schylus has even 

 to undergo some comic A-iolence in its adaptation to the anatomy and 

 economical habits of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Scientific 

 nomenclature is, doubtless, a necessity, and without it there could be 

 little communion of labour or thought among the learned of many 

 lands. Still, one may be permitted to regret, that to the increasing 

 millions who speak that pleasant English tongue, " whose sound " (as 

 has been grandly said) "has gone into all lands, and whose words to 

 the ends of the earth," we cannot as yet teach the marvels of science, 

 the wondrous story of the mutations of their own earth, and unfold 

 its mineral and floral wealth, as readily as we teach them the history 

 of man or the elements of morals or religion. 



We are sadly in want of truly popular explanations of scientific 

 research. The mere English scholar turns up a so-called popular 

 treatise to learn something of an animal, he is enlightened by finding 

 that it is perhaps a graminivorous pachyderm, or some fossilized relic 

 that is " crustacean, semi-calcarious, striated, cordiform, and is never 

 found in palaeozoic formations." A pleasant writer says, " Even the 

 ' banc' books ' and ' outlines ' intended for general readers and docile 

 beginners, abound in words of such puzzling obscurity (not to mention 

 the abstruse speculations frequently implied in their very mention) 

 that one would think the English public was made up of pundits, and 

 been reared in the nursery in the circle of the Sciences." What, in the 

 name of Linnseus, he will ask, can be meant by the sub-Kingdom 

 * Ccelenterata V His knowledge of Greek, be it ever so extensive, will 



