OCTOBKR 3, 1902.] 



SCIENCE. 



537 



at the port have increased tenfold. Since 

 the introduction of the power-loom, about 

 1850, Belfast has distanced all rivals in 

 the linen industry, which continues to 

 flourish notwithstanding the fact that most 

 of the raw material is now imported, in- 

 stead of being- produced, as in former 

 times, in Ulster. Extensive improvements 

 have been carried out in the port at a cost 

 of several millions, and have been fully 

 justified by a very great expansion of trade. 

 These few bare facts suffice to indicate 

 broadly the immense strides taken by Bel- 

 fast in the last two decades. For an Asso- 

 ciation that exists for the advancement of 

 science it is stimulating and encouraging to 

 find itself in the midst of a vigorous com- 

 munity, successfully applying knowledge 

 to the ultimate purpose of all human ef- 

 fort, the amelioration of the common lot 

 by an ever-increasing mastery of the pow- 

 ers and resovirces of Nature. 



TYNDALL AND EVOLUTION". 



The presidential address delivered by 

 Tyndall in this city twenty-eight years ago 

 will always rank as an epoch-making de- 

 liverance. Of all the men of the time, 

 Tyndall was one of the best equipped for 

 the presentation of a vast and complicated 

 scientific subject to the mass of his fellow- 

 men. Gifted with the powers of a many- 

 sided original investigator, he had at the 

 same time devoted much of his time to an 

 earnest study of philosophy, and his liter- 

 ary and oratorical powers, coupled with 

 a fine poetic instinct, were qualifications 

 which placed him in the front rank of the 

 scientific representatives of the later Vic- 

 torian epoch, and constituted him an ex- 

 ceptionally endowed exponent of scientific 

 thought. In the Belfast discourse Tyndall 

 dealt vidth the changing aspects of the long 

 unsettled horizon of human thought, at 

 last illuminated by the sunrise of the doc- 

 trine of evolution. The consununate art 



with which he marshalled his scientific 

 forces for the purpose of effecting convic- 

 tion of the general truth of the doctrine 

 has rarely been surpassed. The courage, 

 the lucidity, the grasp of principles, the 

 moral enthusiasm with which he treated 

 his great theme, have powerfully aided in 

 effecting a great intellectual conquest, and 

 the victory assuredly ought to engender 

 no regrets. 



Tyndall 's views as a strenuous support- 

 er and believer in the theory of evolu- 

 tion were naturally essentially optimistic. 

 He had no sympathy with the lugubrious 

 pessimistic philosophy whose disciples are 

 for ever intent on administering rebuke 

 to scientific workers by reminding them 

 that, however much knowledge man may 

 have acquired, it is as nothing compared 

 with the immensity of his ignorance. That 

 truth is indeed never adequately realized 

 except by the man of science, to whom it is 

 brought home by repeated experience of 

 the fact that his most promising excursions 

 into the unknown are invariably termi- 

 nated by barriers which, for the time at 

 least, are insurmountable. He who has 

 never made such excursions with patient 

 labor may indeed prattle about the vast- 

 ness of the unknown, but he does so with- 

 out real sincerity or intimate conviction. 

 His tacit, if not his avowed, contention is 

 that since we can never know all it is not 

 worth while to seek to know more; and 

 that in the profundity of his ignorance 

 he has the right to people the unexplored 

 spaces with the phantoms of his vain im- 

 agining. The man of science, on the con- 

 trary, finds in the extent of his ignorance 

 a perpetual incentive to further exertion, 

 and in the mysteries that surround him 

 a continual invitation, nay, more, an in- 

 exorable mandate. Tyndall's writings 

 abundantly prove that he had faced the 

 great problems of man's existence with 

 that calm intellectual courage, the lack of 



