Presidential Address. 203 



which have occurred, and I am perhaps better able to 

 appreciate the vast strides that have been taken in the 

 direction of that complete and all-pervading culture in 

 science which he has so ably advocated. 



No one could have anticipated twenty years ago that a 

 Birmingham manufacturer, in whose youthful days there 

 were no schools of science for the people, was about to 

 endow a college, not only worthy of this great city, but one 

 of its brightest ornaments. 1 Nor could any-one have fore- 

 seen the great development of local scientific societies, like 

 your Midland Institute and Philosophical Society, which 

 are now flourishing in every large town and in many of 

 those of less magnitude. The period of twenty-one years 

 that has elapsed since the last Birmingham meeting has also 

 been an era of public museums and laboratories for the 

 teaching of science, from the magnificent national institu- 

 tions at South Kensington and those of the great univer- 

 sities and their colleges down to those of the schools and 

 field clubs in country towns. It has, besides, been an era 

 of gigantic progress in original work, and in publication, — 

 a progress so rapid that workers in every branch of study 

 have been reluctantly obliged to narrow more and more 

 their range of reading, and of effort to keejD abreast of the 

 advance in their several departments, Lastly, these twenty- 

 one years have been characterised as the ' coming of age ' 

 of that great system of philosophy with which the names 

 of three Englishmen, Darwin, Spencer, and Wallace, are 

 associated as its founders. Whatever opinions one may en- 

 tertain as to the sufficiency and finality of that philosophy, 

 there can be no question as to its influence on scientific 

 thought. On the one hand, it is inaccurate to compare 

 it with things so entirely different as the discovery of the 

 chemical elements and of the law of gravitation. On the 

 other, it is scarcely fair to characterise it as a mere 

 ' confused development ' of the mind of the age. It is 

 indeed a new attempt of science in its maturer years to 



1 It was in 1865 that Sir Josiah Mason was, quietly and without 

 any public note, beginning to lay the foundation of his orphanage 

 at Erdington. 



