10 INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 



SCIENCE. 



The term science possesses a resistless charm for hon- 

 est acquirers and promoters of knowledge, because its 

 object is truth, and its very name is a perpetual promise 

 of the communication of certain knowledge : of wholly 

 reliable conclusions or facts. 



Only pure science, however, which is built on self-evi- 

 dent truths, can fully redeem the promise. Much knowl- 

 edge, that is properly scientific is, and will necessarily 

 continue to be, tentative. Its authority will rule until 

 discoveries shall show that it was incomplete or errone- 

 ous, when it must be corrected or discarded. The science 

 of chemistry, for example, is showing that even sub- 

 stances which were accepted and declared to be elemental 

 are compounds. Scientific theories, which from time to 

 time have been held to be true and received the confident 

 endorsement of the scientists of their period, have been 

 found to be altogether untenable. 



Baron Paul Holbach's System of Nature, which com- 

 manded the sweeping assent of the mind of his day, is 

 now almost wholly neglected or disregarded. President 

 Porter in accounting for this says, " that its science is 

 antiquated, having literally been left behind in every 

 point of detail, by the rush of discovery and experiment 

 since he wrote/' 



We hear the suggestion occasionally issuing from in- 

 fluential sources, that even the great science of geology 

 may need to be greatly modified or radically recon- 

 structed. Certain is it, that the reading of the masterly 

 address of the retiring President, Principal Dawson, 

 made at the recent meeting of the American Association 

 for the Advancement of Science, leaves no distincter im- 

 pression upon the mind, than the unsettledness of many 

 geological conclusions that have been deemed most 

 firmly settled. He refers as to other points, to the theory 

 of "the mode of the formation of coal," held most confi- 



