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ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 
publication of his imperishable book, and have placed on record their esti¬ 
mates of the transcendent importance of his work and the permanence and 
universality of his influence. Essay after essay has been printed, and volume 
after volume has been published, all to set forth the fact that to no one else, 
as much as to Charles Darwin, is the intellectual world indebted for a 
revivifying and newly impelling thought. Among all the gatherings of the 
year the most representative and the most important was the congress which 
assembled in Cambridge, England, last June. At that convocation nearly 
every nation which values culture and every department of higher learning 
were represented. No such assemblage was ever before convened to pay 
tribute to the memory of a scientific worker, and I think I am safe in assert¬ 
ing that none such could be brought together to honor the name of any of the 
earlier advocates of evolution. There was a mere handful of foreign scien¬ 
tists at the dedication of the Lamarck statue in Paris, although delegates 
were flocking from every direction to Cambridge, and many of them probably 
could have stopped over at Paris if they had felt disposed to divide honors 
between Lamarck and Darwin. I think Dr. L. O. Howard, of Washington, 
was the only American present in a professional capacity and that I was the 
only one among hoi polloi, whereas at Cambridge thirty-two American in¬ 
stitutions were represented by more than a score of delegates. 
To the Darwin celebration, two hundred and forty-two institutions, 
of twenty-nine different countries, sent two hundred and thirty-three delegates 
who, with one hundred and eighty-seven other invited guests, constituted an 
impressive convention of four hundred and twenty persons. This was no per¬ 
functory meeting,— it was a gathering with the serious purpose of pronouncing 
a final judgment. It was animated by a spirit of triumph. Its meaning 
was that Science as a whole had come into its own and that Charles 
Darwin was the leader who had brought it into the promised land. In 
public speech and private conversation there was one dominant note of 
exultation, and this was sounded alike by biologist and theologian, by physi¬ 
cist and metaphysician, by experimentalist and philosopher,— all hailing 
the day of freer thought and wider mental out-reach due preeminently to the 
advent of the idea of evolution set once for all upon a sound logical founda¬ 
tion by Charles Darwin. 
Among other important mementos of that great occasion is a volume 
of twenty-nine essays specially prepared at the request of the Cambridge 
Philosophical Society, and published by the University Press, under the 
title “ Darwin and Modern Science.” These essays are intended to set forth, 
in a composite picture, the various departments of learning to the advance¬ 
ment of which Darwin’s researches and writings have contributed, but their 
significance is not so much in the completeness or accuracy with which they 
