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departed from. Still, a few words on the subject may not be inap- 
propriate to the occasion. There are two errors which we must 
carefully guard against in our practice : — the one, that of imagining 
this room to be a place proper for the exposition of old truths, — in other 
words, as in any sense a lecture-room ; the other, that of regarding our 
Society as, to any large extent, a combination of force, a union of 
physical and pecuniary appliances wherewith to attack problems and 
institute experimental researches which could not readily be dealt 
with by individuals. It is quite true that most of the old learned 
societies were established with a view to one or the other of these 
objects. The Academia del Cimento, for instance, was founded for 
the purpose of instituting experiments on a scale which no indi- 
vidual philosopher of that age durst have ventured on single-handed. 
So, too, of the Royal Society of London. The writings of Bacon 
had just opened a wide vista to the eye of the investigator of 
nature, and from this cause, amongst others, men’s minds were 
beginning to entertain hankerings after new forms of truth. To 
the eye of the philosopher, who sees in the retardation and gra- 
dual dispensation of knowledge the hand which retains the shower 
until the seed has lain its full time in the earth, the phe- 
nomenon is neither startling nor inexplicable, of men hurrying to 
and fro under the influence of some excitement, whose determining 
period is in the future. The old Royal Society was assuredly com- 
posed of men drawn together by strange unearthly longings, the in- 
terpretation of which must be sought for in the subsequent quarter of 
the century, when the “ Principia” and strict experimental philosophy 
had come in. The pages of Birch indicate plainly enough what was 
the object of that Society at its first formation. They reveal to 
us the fact, that the streams of truth had stagnated so long amongst 
the marshes of the Middle Ages as to have become altogether pol- 
luted, so that an individual thirsting for its waters found himself 
utterly suffocated, utterly helpless, in attempting to search out the 
pure descending rill. Impelled by this feeling of inability, men 
clung to each other, held firmly hand to hand, and thus united 
marched on. We may smile at the apparent frivolity of many of 
their earlier papers, but they convey their lesson notwithstanding. 
Their first President, Sir Robert Moray, on the day of his first 
election, 6th March 1661, gives in a marvellous paper, in which he 
tells his hearers, that the drift-wood cast ashore on the Western Isles 
