BOSTON SOCIETY OF NATURAL HISTORY. 217 



shores, and to distribute to all countries the peculiar productions of each. These wonder- 

 ful achievements of mechanics and physics, aided by chemistry, produce indirect effects 

 upon the well-being of man, some good effects and some bad, with a probable preponder- 

 ance of good ; but their direct influence upon human character and happiness is not large. 

 The reduction in size of our earth, our country, or our town, which railways, telegraphs 

 and telephones have brought about is in itself no satisfaction. Rapid locomotion is not an 

 object' in itself Does the average man get any more happiness out of his little span than 

 he did one hundred years ago ? or does he have a longer span ? And if he does, have the 

 inventions of the past century in mechanics and physics been a direct cause of the im- 

 provement ? The answers to these questions are not ready and clear. We hesitate to 

 give an affirmative reply. The fact is, that mechanics and physics deal only indirectly 

 with human misery, — namely, climatic influences, not understood, and, therefore, not to 

 be guarded against, violent and unpredictable extremes of heat or cold, wetness or dry- 

 ness, ravages of noxious plants and animals, diseases both of men and of useful animals 

 and untimely death. All these evils belong to the domain of natural history, and for ulti- 

 mate deliverance from them we must look to the student of natural science. 



It is astonishing how little progress has been made by the race in discovering the means 

 of overcoming these evils. Civilized society to-day would be almost as helpless as Pharaoh 

 was against the plagues which afflicted the Egyptians, — the river water suddenly made so 

 foul that the fish in it died, frogs, lice, flies, a murrain upon cattle, boils, hail, locusts, dark 

 foo's and the dread pestilence which struck one race and spared another upon the same 

 soil. These are evils which, for the most part, we find resistless to-day. Every now and 

 then some city's water supply is rendered unfit for use by an extraordinary production of 

 multitudinous little plants or animals ; the plant-louse destroys the vines in a wine-produc- 

 ing country, and brings the whole population to want ; pleuro-pneumonia kills the cat- 

 tle now in this district, now in that ; an obscure fungus causes the potato to rot, and a 

 sudden famine is the result ; the Colorado beetle, once a rarity in the collections of ento- 

 mologists, swarms over a continent, devouring vast crops, and forcing the husbandman to 

 abandon, for a time at least, the cultivation of various useful plants ; in some of the West- 

 ern States the harvest depends, not so much on the foresight and skill of man as on the 

 favorableness or unfavorableness of the season to the development of grasshoppers. In- 

 deed thus far, any single-minded and prolific worm is more than a match for man. Think, 

 too, of the diseases which afflict humanity, and are the source of by far the greater part of 

 the sufferings and sorrows of men ! There are the regular diseases to which we are so 

 accustomed that we consider them normal phenomena, the new diseases, which appear or 

 reappear at considerable intervals, and the occasional pestilences. Man is stUl so ignorant 

 of the causes and sources of these various disorders, of the conditions which develop them, 

 *^ and of the means of eradicating and resisting them, that he is inclined to regard disease 

 as a part of the order of nature, over which he can win no control. 



But in view of all that science has accomplished within the lifetime of this Society, shall 

 we not declare that this idea of nature and of man's relation to his environment is cow- 

 ardly, stupid and ungrateful ? Can we not clearly foresee that by the patient, thorough, 

 cumulative study of natural history in all its branches, men will gradually arrive at a 

 knowledge of plants and animals, and of the faYorable and unfavorable conditions of life 



