684 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XV. No. 383. 



is these alone which have governed— and 

 must always govern human affairs and 

 human progress. 



When I remind you that the life and 

 labors of our Society have covered five gen- 

 erations as these are usually estimated, it is 

 pertinent to remark that mere non-com- 

 parative figures convey but little definite 

 apprehension to the mind unaccustomed to 

 dealing with large numbers. When one of 

 our justly distinguished astronomical mem- 

 bers tells us that a given star is distant so 

 many hundred millions of miles, the figures 

 carry little real information to those of us 

 who are not accustomed like him to con- 

 sider such enormous numerals. But when 

 he measures to us their equivalent in diam- 

 eters of the earth's orbit, or proves that its 

 light at known rates of motion must require 

 some centuries to reach us, then we can 

 get some notion of the results that he has 

 reached in traversing the laborious march 

 from hypothesis to demonstration. So, 

 when we reflect that more than one of the 

 sciences noAV best known had their first 

 crude beginnings and earliest struggles in 

 this hall, we get a more definite idea of the 

 venerable age of our Society and the work 

 that has been done here. If, for example, 

 we turn to human anatomy, where our re- 

 searches have so remarkably advanced our 

 knowledge, it is true that dissections had 

 been made, and the leading facts of struc- 

 ture, and even of function, ascertained 

 before our Society was born. One might 

 therefore suppose that human osteology at 

 least — the knowledge of those essential and 

 durable organs most prominent in all dis- 

 sections — was then well known. And yet 

 this Society had been in existence for more 

 than half a century, when new bones and 

 new parts and functions of bones were first 

 discovered and described by one of our 

 members in this room, which excited the 

 interest and induced the correspondence 



of such famous anatomists as Cuvier, Som- 

 mering and others. 



Taking a glance at geology, it is prob- 

 able that one of the most epochal books 

 ever written prior to the vaster generaliza- 

 tions of Darwin, was that of Sir Charles 

 Lyell. And yet even before the birth of 

 Lyell, when Hutton and the early English 

 geologists were first beginning to be dis- 

 satisfied with the Noachian deluge as the 

 only available explanation of the phe- 

 nomena they noted, fossil remains were 

 examined and described in this hall, and 

 the work of our members had no trivial 

 share in guiding the world to the real solu- 

 tion. Our early geologists— like theirs — 

 found that problematic deluge entirely in- 

 adequate to explain even such primitive 

 facts as the existence of marine remains 

 hundreds of miles from any then known 

 ancient or modern seacoast, or the massive 

 deposits of calcareous rocks containing 

 marine shells and Crustacea high up on 

 mountain sides remote from the sea, or of 

 the ripple marks, foot tracks and actual 

 remains found embedded deeply in solid 

 sandstone strata. Such early doubts and 

 difficulties found appropriate and congen- 

 ial place in the Proceedings of this Society, 

 and Mr. Curtis in his recent life of Jef- 

 ferson tells an amusing story in that con- 

 nection. 



The great statesman was at the same time 

 president of the United States and of this 

 Society, and sometimes professed to doubt 

 which of those honors he valued most. He 

 had covered the fioor of a large room in 

 the White House with miscellaneous fossil 

 bones sent to him from Virginia, and had 

 formed theories concerning them which 

 were so unsatisfactory to himself that he 

 begged one of his friends— a distinguished 

 paleontologist of this Society— to come to 

 Washington and examine them. A carriage 

 journey from Philadelphia to Washington 

 before the days of steam was no trifling 



