110 
ANNUAL ADDRESS. 
Of the metaphysical standpoint I am not in any way qualified to 
speak. But it seems to me to be one of the most interesting* and 
at the same time one of the most "foreign," if I may use the 
word, of all points of view. It explains matters on a level which 
carries the subject into a high rarified atmosphere where ordinary 
work on Natural History is not easy. . . . It is a standpoint 
which can only be taken by a man accustomed to abstract thought. 
In his hands it may become a most illuminating guide. 
These are only a few of the many sides from which natural 
objects and phenomena can be studied. And the truth lies not 
in one point of view alone. We have, it seems to me, no right to 
exclude the poet, or the metaphysician, or the theologian from the 
field. They give impressions of what they see and think, which 
we should examine w T ith open and candid minds. If we can only 
look upon an animal or flower from one point of view, however 
exalted that may be, we are apt to be imperfect in our judgment. 
Wordsworth was a type of a fine intellect who did not allow any 
of the sides of Nature, except two or three to appeal to him. He 
was therefore, in spite of his magnificent thoughts, narrow and 
rather bigoted. He realized the grandeur, the beauty, the appeal 
to the Spirit. He could not and would not look at the thing from 
the standpoint of the minute observer and the investigator. 
" We murder to dissect," he says — and we ought really to have a 
grain of sympathy with the man who could "peep and botanize 
upon his mother's grave." The bare statement of the fact sounds 
horrible — but it really would be no disrespect to the departed to be 
interested in a beautiful or rare plant which had been sown on the 
grave from " the lap of some wandering wind." 
Truth is many sided. Ruskin says somewhere that he never 
considered he had really thought out a subject until he had 
contradicted himself at least three times — and a man may be very 
definite about a thing if he looks at it from one point of view only, 
but uncertain if he looks at it from many — so, we falter where we 
firmly trod as our knowledge and powers develop. 
The outcome of these brief and rambling notes is this ; that 
many standpoints are legitimate in science. There is room for the 
merely accurate observer, the statistician, the abstract thinker, the 
metaphysician, the poet. The only men there is not room for are 
the persistently or wilfully inaccurate. 
