10 LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 
can bring to the surface many a bit of rare and valuable ore. 
That is one reason why we have constituted the Liverpool 
Biological Society. Without such a society that bit of 
ore is too apt to be flung aside, after the first fleeting 
interest which it has excited has passed away. But 
when it is brought up before us here in the form of a 
paper or communication, it will have to be cleansed and 
sifted before it can be laid upon the table, and, when it 
has passed through the crucible of criticism and discussion, 
such good bright metal may be extracted from it as will be 
worthy to be added to the current coin of biological science. 
Let every piece of work we bring here be turned over 
and over again. Let us have our doubts about it;—let us 
view our discoveries with suspicion, until we feel that we 
can satisfy, not ourselves only, but our fellows. Let us 
see that our building materials are sound. We can most 
of us only bring our brick, our beam of timber, our hod of 
mortar, but however small our contribution, let it be that 
of honest workmen. For some day there will come a 
master builder—a Darwin—who will gather these together, 
and will build a fair biological temple out of them, and it 
would indeed be a shame to us if our false work were to 
mar that edifice. 
It is indeed a glorious thing to live in an age when the 
pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is admitted to be 
the noblest occupation of a man. The chemist of to-day 
is no longer the alchemist of yore, whose weary days and 
nights were consumed in the pursuit of that philosopher’s 
stone, which was to make him the richest—and probably 
the wretchedest—of mankind. To-day, in science, we 
re-echo the old Welsh cry, ‘“‘ The truth before the world.”’ 
What thought those chemists, who first in their laboratories 
distilled off ether and chloroform, and ticketed them with 
letters, and made notes on their atomic composition ? 
