DARWIN MEMORIAL CELEBRATION 
39 
If one were forced to accept the presidential addresses of the American 
Association for the Advancement of Science as indicative of the advance¬ 
ment of science in American associations, the address of 1873, delivered 
by one who said he thought that natural selection had died with Lamarck, 
would be sadly misleading. He writes: 
In Darwin we have one of those philosophers whose great knowledge of animal 
and vegetable life is transcended only by his imagination. In fact, he is to be 
regarded more as a metaphysician with a highly-wrought imagination than as a 
scientist. 
But this is only the beginning of the gloom that anticipated the dawn. 
Although in 1874 Dr. Elsberg, in a “ Contribution to the Doctrine of 
Evolution,” addressed this academy (and also the American Association 
for the Advancement of Science), in favor of the principles of Darwin, 
although Cope continued to sustain his earlier contentions, and general 
workers were beginning to make original observations in favor of the princi¬ 
ples of organic descent, the reviewers of the deliberations of scientific gather¬ 
ings gave little promise of anything like a general acceptance of the beliefs 
in which we are interested. 
In 1875, the retiring president of the American Association said: 
I fear that the unhappy spirit of contention still survives, and that there are a 
few who fight for victory rather than for the truth. 
One of the vice-presidents at this meeting declined to “enter on the vast 
field of discussion. . . . opened up by Darwin and others,” and resolved to 
avoid the use of the word “evolution,” “as this has recently been employed 
in so many senses as to have become nearly useless for any scientific purpose.” 
Thus closed five years of struggle. 
The year 1876, the centennial of political independence in America, 
marked also the dawn of intellectual independence and scientific freedom. 
It was the year of Brooks’s first Salpa paper, and of his paper on pangenesis. 
Cope explicitly stated that the law of natural selection was now generally 
accepted, and the then librarian of this academy, Louis Elsberg, submitted 
his paper on the plastidule hypothesis, as nonchalantly as though he were 
discussing the lingual ribbon. 
It was under these really blessed conditions that the American Asso¬ 
ciation met in Buffalo and listened to a vice-presidential address fully worthy 
the title of the organization. Edward S. Morse had demonstrated his 
ability as an investigator in his paper of 1872, already mentioned, but the 
simple, straightforward, patient and kindly manner in which he addressed 
his audience in 1876, the thoroughness with which he scanned the work of 
