﻿290 Canadian Record of Science. 



mighty Alps, we do not know. How long it is since 

 these mountains were formed, how long before the Alps 

 the Variscian curve was built, how long before this the 

 Caledonian curve, how long before this the gneisses of the 

 Hebrides were folded and rumpled up, no man can say. 

 When, in each of these cases, the foldings and when the 

 great subsidences occurred, when the crust of the earth 

 first solidified around the core of iron, we know not. 

 The distances of the fixed stars, with but few exceptions, 

 we are ignorant of, and here also we lack every measure 

 and comparison. 



He who gives himself to such reflections is lifted into a 

 sphere in which not only human measures disappear, but 

 the little human individual too, and he feels himself 

 at the same time melt away like a cloud of mist before the 

 sun, because he is no longer concerned with earthly but 

 with cosmic quantities. Thus we reach not only the 

 limits of our knowledsje, the limits of our imasrination, but 

 the limits of our faculty of comprehension. 



He who returns from such studies to the plane of 

 commonplace daily life is strengthened as one who 

 descends from mountain heights. 



I dare not hope, in such a short address, to have 

 awakened in you similar feelings, but will you not at least 

 carry away with you, in opposition to the sickly 

 pessimism which here and there is preached, the remem- 

 brance that in our day mankind has risen to views 

 regarding the essence of natural phenomena, which are 

 grander than the race has ever possessed in times past, 

 and that although nations stand armed against nations, 

 there are, nevertheless, in all cultured peoples men who, 

 high above these variances, strive together with the 

 investigators of all peoples of the earth untiringly and 

 without envy, as brothers, towards a truer conception 

 of the facts and laws of Nature. 



