Septembee 13, 1895.] 



SCIENCE. 



315 



vance which had been made. But so great 

 have been the discoveries which have fol- 

 lowed, and so wonderful have been the 

 changes which these discoveries have 

 wrought, that we can hardly appreciate 

 that many of the great scientific truths of 

 to-day were but cautiously advanced theories 

 at that time. 



It was during the year preceding that 

 meeting that the paper of Wallace ' on the 

 tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely 

 from the original type ' and Darwin's paper 

 ' on the tendency of species to form vari- 

 eties' were read, simultaneously, before the 

 Linnsean society. On the first of October 

 following that meeting Darwin published 

 his ' Origin of Species,' which more than a 

 decade later caused the French Academy to 

 reject him as a candidate for membership 

 by a vote of more than two-thirds, one of 

 its menbers declaring that the ' Origin of 

 Species ' was ' a mass of assertions and ab- 

 solutely gratuitous hypotheses, often evi- 

 dently fallacious.' 



Truly, ' the stone which the builders re- 

 fused is become the headstone of the cor- 

 ner,' for the doctrines of Darwin's work are 

 now recognized and accepted by the learned 

 and scientific of the civilized world; and 

 evolution, which was for years scorned and 

 rejected not only by the great majority of 

 the scientific, but by pretty much everybody 

 whose views upon the subject were entitled 

 to weight, is now almost universally ac- 

 cepted. 



During this period the doctrine of spon- 

 taneous generation received the aggressive 

 attention of scientists. The views of the 

 learned Pasteur, which were opposed to 

 this doctrine, were contested, and were sup- 

 posed to have been refuted by the experi- 

 ments of Wyman. The theory of sponta- 

 neous generation is no longer accepted, 

 but out of the agitation which it created, 

 was born the new science of bacteriology. 



Indeed, during the period of which I am 



speaking, the progress in geological, zoolog- 

 ical, physiological and astronomical science, 

 in chemistry and in physics, has been mar- 

 vellous. The wonderful development and 

 utilization of electric forces, which forms 

 such a marked demonstration of the value 

 of scientific research, was not then dreamed 

 of. Even the Atlantic Cable had not been 

 successfully laid, and the results of the 

 wonderful inventions of Edison, of Bell and 

 of many others of the great discoverers and 

 inventors of the electrical woi'ld were not 

 for a moment contemplated. 



The doctrine of the antiquity of man, 

 which sought to place and which now places 

 his origin far back beyond the period of 

 6000 years, which was then zealously con- 

 tested, is now not only adopted by scien- 

 tists, but is accepted complacently by all 

 the well-informed without any shock to 

 their religious feelings. 



These great advances, which have enter- 

 tained, enlightened and improved the mind, 

 and added greatly to the comfort, happiness 

 and welfare of mankind, are the result of 

 investigation and study by men such aa 

 those of you whose lives are devoted to 

 scientific research and who are here assem- 

 bled as an association under a constitution 

 proclaiming its object to be : " By periodic 

 and migratory meetings, to promote inter- 

 course between those who are cultivating 

 science in different parts of America, to 

 give a stronger and more general impulse 

 and more systematic direction to scientific 

 research, and to procure for the labors of 

 scientific men increased facilities and a 

 wider usefulness." 



You have assembled in a city which has 

 sprung from one of the earliest settlements 

 in this Commonwealth. Here, 260 years 

 ago, the rude cabins 'of the first white set- 

 tlers were erected. Here our Puritan an- 

 cestors found in large numbers, contented 

 and happy in their savage freedom and ig- 

 norance, the American Indian, from whom 



