218 HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE 



for all plants and animals, which will give them control over many evils which they now 

 find wholly mysterious and irresistible ? I can only touch very briefly upon some of the 

 grounds of this belief. 



The physician or surgeon of the last century was hardly wiser than Hippocrates or 

 more successful ; but any old physician or surgeon would tell us to-day that the means 

 and methods of observation, diagnosis and treatment have wonderfully improved during 

 his lifetime ; that many operations are now successfully performed which were formerly 

 supposed to be impossible ; that the whole subject of preventive medicine and public hy- 

 giene has been developed in his day ; and that he has seen the beginnings of the scien- 

 tific study of heredity, that most fruitful and promising field of scientific and philanthropic 

 research. Thanks in part to the progress in physics and chemistry, natural history pos- 

 sesses new and powerful implements of research, and new methods of inquiry which are 

 of infinite promise. The morbid anatomist observes, not the gross external appearances, 

 but the abnormal cellular changes which produce, or are, disease ; the physiologist studies 

 the processes of living animals ; the chemist is constantly making natural organic products 

 by artificial means ; the embryologist has become conversant with those slight differentia- 

 tions in the egg which are the starting points of wide diversities ; substantial beginnings 

 of weather knowledge appear ; the whole earth has been explored, and now for the first 

 time the fauna of the ocean abysses is made known. 



Antiquity had its great students of nature, but they lacked the means of diffusing, pre- 

 serving and accumulating their discoveries. The past four centuries have had abundant 

 means of recording and transmitting from one generation to another all the scientific truth 

 which they became possessed of. It is in this steady, patient and orderly accumulation of 

 facts concerning living things that the hope of winning for man new powers over the 

 gravest natural evils really lies. This Society has a part in making that pregnant record. 

 There is another aspect of your work which seems to me very important. You propose 

 to maintain for the public an exhibition of all forms of vegetable and animal life in their 

 wondrous and endless variety. Hither people may come and see their fellow-beings in the 

 widest and truest sense. Moralists tell us that the best development of an individual man 

 is not to be reached through introspection, self-reference and an overweening anxiety about 

 his own salvation. They say to every man — look out and not in. The same exhortation 

 might well be addressed to the human race. Mankind needs to look out, and not in ; to 

 realize that it is but one, though a noble one, among countless races and tribes of crea- 

 tures which inhabit or have inhabited this atom of an earth, and that its welfare is not the 

 sole end of creation, or the one absorbing interest of the Creator. A few years ago all 

 men believed that the whole boundless universe centred upon man. That delusion has 

 lost its hold, except perhaps within the well-protected domain of dogmatic theology. But 

 there are still many people who cling to the kindred conceit that this earth, at least, was 

 made for man. It is a belief which will not survive much acquaintance with the vast soli- 

 tudes of the earth which teem with other life than man's — the everglades, the jungles, 

 the mountains and seas. It is a belief which a thoughtful man or child will be apt to qual- 

 ify or resign, as he studiously examines such a collection of natural history as this Society 

 strives to maintain. 



