Vol. 59.] ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. lxxi 



been proved to him by his own wanderings, and by those of his fore- 

 fathers generation after generation. Thus the idea of the vastness 

 of space had already become a part of man's intellectual equipment 

 long before the origin of Astronomy itself. And this idea has 

 been deepened, broadened, and strengthened during the successive 

 centuries of progress by the employment of constantly-improving 

 instruments of accurate measurement, by the invention of the 

 telescope, the discoveries of Geography, and by the application of 

 the higher mathematics to Astronomy as a whole. 



But early man (and indeed his successors even down to and 

 beyond the Middle Ages) was miserably provided with the ex- 

 periences which might bring home to his mind the immensity of 

 time. Early man himself had for his longest trustworthy chrono- 

 logical base-line a short seventy years — the span of his own existence, 

 — or at most perhaps a hundred years, if he included the experience 

 of his parents. Even in classical times all the past was to 

 his experience vague and indefinite. He had, it is true, mythical 

 traditions of heroic ages, golden ages, and the like, but these when 

 summed up were merely the legendary total of the experiences 

 of but a few generations. Bound down as was man's mind by 

 his anthropomorphic ideas, he naturally assigned to the earth and 

 mankind a correspondingly brief existence ; a few generations — a 

 few centuries at the most — must have witnessed its birth ; a few 

 generations more must inevitably bring about its death and dis- 

 appearance. Even since the invention of letters and the compilation 

 of accurate historical records, the period of time of which man 

 possesses experience, either personally or collectively, is at most a 

 very few thousands of years. It is hopeless to expect, therefore, 

 that for a long period to come the geological concept of the 

 immensity of past time will permeate the minds of the many, or 

 that they will accept the conclusions of Geology where time is con- 

 cerned, with the same confidence as that with which they have long 

 since accepted the conclusions of Astronomy. 



But this intellectual backwardness of the race in the matter of 

 the appreciation of the vastness of geological time is not only a 

 stumbling-block in the way of the acceptance of the results of 

 Geology among the public at large, but also to the workers in 

 other sciences, and even to the students of Geology itself. It is well 

 within the memory of many of us how even those holding the most 

 advanced views in other sciences were intensely reluctant to acknow- 

 ledge the possibility of the existence of man upon the earth for more 

 VOL. lix. f 



