1885.] 



Presidents Address. 



293 



by fungoid parasites in the animal economy, and that of the means 

 of checking them, even though, as yet, unfortunately, it be only in a 

 few cases. 



But though these practical results of scientific work, during only 

 two generations, are calculated to impress the imagination, the 

 Fellows of this Society know well enough that they are of vastly less 

 real importance than the additions which have been made to fact 

 and theory and serviceable hypothesis in the region of pure science. 

 But it is exactly in these respects that the record of the past half 

 century is so exceptionally brilliant. It is sometimes said that our 

 time is a day of small things — in science it has been a day of the 

 greatest things, for, within this time, falls the establishment, on a 

 safe basis, of the greatest of all the generalisations of science, the 

 doctrines of the Conservation of Energy and of Evolution. 



As for work of less wide scope, I speak in the hearing of those 

 who can correct me if I am wrong, when I say that the larger moiety 

 of our present knowledge of light, heat, electricity, and magnetism, 

 has been acquired within the time to which I refer ; and that our 

 present chemistry has been in great part created, while the whole 

 science has been remodelled from foundation to roof. It may be 

 natural that progress should appear most striking to me among 

 those sciences to which my own attention has been directed, but I 

 do not think this will wholly account for the apparent advance " by 

 leaps and bounds " of the biological sciences within my recollection. 

 The cell theory was the latest novelty when I began to work with 

 the microscope, and I have watched the building of the whole vast 

 fabric of histology ; I can say almost as much of embryology, since 

 Von Baer's great work was published in 1828. Our knowledge 

 of the morphology of the lower animals and plants, and a great deal 

 of that of the higher forms, has very largely been obtained in my 

 time ; while physiology has been put upon a totally new foundation 

 and, as it were reconstructed, by the thorough application of the 

 experimental method to the study of the phenomena of life, and by 

 the accurate determination of the purely physical and chemical com- 

 ponents of these phenomena. The exact nature of the processes of 

 sexual and nonsexual reproduction has been brought to light. Our 

 knowledge of geographical and geological distribution, and of the 

 extinct forms of life, has been increased a hundredfold. As for the 

 progress of geological science, what more need be said than that the 

 first volume of Ly ell's " Principles " bears the date of 1830 ? 



This brief enumeration of the salient achievements of science in 

 the course of the last sixty years is sufficient not only to justify 

 what I have said respecting their absolute value, but to show how 

 much it excels, both in quantity and quality, the work produced 

 in any corresponding period since the revival of science. It suggests, 



