16 
ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 
73. Portraits of Darwin’s contemporaries. Eighty transparencies. 
74. Interior of Darwin’s Library. (Property of H. F. Osborn.) 
The exercises of the afternoon were held around the bust as a center. 
The President of the Academy, Mr. Charles F. Cox, called the meeting to 
order at about a quarter after three o’clock and delivered the following 
address: 
THE INDIVIDUALITY OF CHARLES DARWIN. 
By Charles F. Cox. 
We are assembled, at the invitation of an organization devoted to the 
dissemination of scientific knowledge, under the hospitable roof of an 
institution maintained for the promotion of systematic observation, for the 
purpose of honoring the memory of one of the greatest of seers. Charles 
Darwin, whose birthday we celebrate, was a man of the clearest mental 
vision born into a generation scientifically blind. He first, of those in his 
day accounted wise, was able to see all nature unfolding according to uni¬ 
form and verifiable law. The outlook of other men called by his contem¬ 
poraries scientists and philosophers was, as a rule, limited and obscured by 
a narrowing and hampering doctrine of supernatural intervention. It is 
hard for us, who are privileged to contemplate w r ith admiring minds the 
harmonious interrelations of all natural phenomena, to realize that only 
fifty years ago it was commonly regarded as both irrational and immoral to 
believe that one great principle underlay the origin, maintenance, diversifica¬ 
tion and development of living forms and that that principle was discov¬ 
erable through human investigation. During the ages previous to the 
memorable year 1859 a few bold thinkers, now and then, had ventured to 
suggest a theory of general evolution, but they had failed to supply it with a 
substantial foundation of proof, or to assign to it a reasonable and intelligible 
cause, and had been, consequently, one and all, overwhelmed and sup¬ 
pressed by the powerful and prevalent dogma of special creation. Natura¬ 
lists had been for centuries active in the collection of facts, but, until Darwin 
came, the various attributes and activities of living things remained discon¬ 
nected and unexplained. Indeed, it was impossible that they should have 
been correlated and elucidated as long as the domain of science was in 
thralldom to tyrannical authority and originality of thought was little less 
than a crime. For a hundred years prior to Darwin even professed students 
of nature were not free to see what lay under their very eyes. The scientific 
