22 
ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 
cipal and private munificence with the ardor of exploration and research 
and devotion to public scientific education for which this institution stands 
meets the approval and support of the members of the New York Academy 
of Sciences, the oldest and most dignified of all the scientific associations in 
this great city. This gift will encourage the Museum to renewed efforts 
both in the sphere of pure science and in the sphere of popular education. 
Finally the gift is welcome because it permanently associates the name of 
the great naturalist with the Museum and especially with one of our newer 
exhibition halls, which is especially devoted to the exposition of the great 
general phenomena of biology, as seen in the structure, the embryonic 
development, the adaptness in color and form, the marvelous diversity 
but yet unity of the animal world, to the true interpretation of which Charles 
Darwin devoted his life. 
Further to cement the name and spirit of Darwin with the exhibition in 
the midst of which this splendid portrait will be placed, it gives me great 
pleasure to announce that the Trustees have unanimously voted to name 
this hall after the illustrious naturalist, “Darwin Hall,” and have prepared 
and placed here on this centennial day two bronze tablets which will be a 
permanent record of the time and place of this dedication. 
At the close of President Osborn’s address the following addresses were 
delivered, setting forth Darwin’s relations to the three subdivisions of 
natural science — geology, botany and zoology — in pursuit of which he 
expended his great energies. 
DARWIN AND GEOLOGY. 
By Professor John James Stevenson. 
Charles Darwin was born in a time of intellectual unrest. Explorers, 
students of chemistry and workers in mines had been adding to actual 
knowledge for nearly one third of a century and thoughtful men had been 
forced to recognize the worthlessness of many conceptions which had long 
passed current. Nowhere was this unrest more manifest than among the 
younger geologists; but they were compelled to express themselves cautiously 
for, fettered by a false chronology, the church dignitaries who controlled 
the universities rebuked investigation and branded as infidels those who 
recorded obnoxious facts. Little more than a year prior to Darwin’s birth, 
the Geological Society of London had been founded as a protest against 
subjective study of this globe, but already many adherents to the principles 
