264 
Proceedings of the Royal Society 
Monday, bth December 1864. 
His Grace the Duke of Argyll, at the request of the Council, 
delivered the following Opening Address ; — 
In opening this Session of the Eoyal Society of Edinburgh, at the 
close of my tenure of the Presidency, I must express my sincere 
regret on account of the small amount of attendance which it has 
been in my power to give. I can only assure you that, if I had had 
the opportunity, my attendance would have been far more regular ; 
and that nothing but the impossibility of reconciling this with 
other duties has prevented my occupying this chair as often as the 
honour you have done me, and not less my own inclination, would 
have led me to do. 
During the years which have elapsed since I first had the honour 
of addressing you from this chair, science has been enriched by 
an accumulated store of facts in many branches of inquiry, and 
by not a few of those discussions which so often promote, quite as 
much as actual discovery, the advance of knowledge. Our own 
Society has not been idle. Valuable papers have been communi- 
cated on a great variety of subjects ; and when we look, not merely 
at the number and variety of these, but at the detailed character of 
many of them, and remember the number of Societies which are 
specially devoted to special subjects, it is impossible not to be im- 
pressed with the immense scope, as well as with the laborious minute- 
ness, of modern investigation. But, divided and subdivided as the 
natural sciences have come to be, they all touch each other at innu- 
merable points ; and there are some questions touching the shadowy 
line that connects rather than separates the physical and the meta- 
physical, on which almost all the sciences are found to have a 
common, and often an unexpected bearing. Such, for example, is 
the subject with which Geology, and Palaeontology, and Compara- 
tive Anatomy, and Archaeology, and the mental sciences, have all 
been of late years so busy, and on which different schools of 
thought are now disputing every inch of ground. That subject is 
the history of Organic Life; and the question, whether in that 
