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Proceedings of the Royal Society 
liianence and of change, which surrounds it with interest. It points 
to a commencement which probably no survivor recollects, and even 
in periods the least eventful, its long roll of expectations, efforts, 
and vicissitudes cannot be regarded without a share of emotion. 
But the century along which I invite you to look back to-night is 
BO crowded with events in the political and social history of the 
world, that its commencement shades obscurely away into the past. 
Since that day in dim December, when our great predecessors first 
gathered together, under the shadow of their new Charter, all that 
was greatest and brightest in Scottish intellect at that time, what a 
marvellous wave of change has swept over the civilised world. The 
echoes of 1783 come to us as from the distant past, and range with 
the historic, not with the present. We think of the Mirror and 
the Lounger, rather as the contemporaries of the Spectator and 
the T after, than of ourselves, as though they had been the in- 
habitants of a different sphere from that in which we find ourselves 
to-day. 
Such is the instinctive feeling which first arises in the mind when 
we try to span in thought the interval between then and now ; and 
80 I felt when I began my preparation for my duty to-night. I have 
in the course of it been living with the great men of former days, as I 
find their thoughts recorded in our annals. I have gone over our 
Transactions for the first fifty years of the existence of the Society, 
and have risen from my task deeply impressed by the wealth of 
Cultivated ability which that repertory contains. I mean to ask 
you to-night to accompany me in rather a rapid journey over that 
period, along with some of the best travelling companions which 
Scotland ever saw. As I became familiar with details, and the 
actual personality of the men, I found the apparent distance percep- 
tibly diminish, and began to think the century not so wide a chasm 
after all. This impression was heightened by finding, when I took 
my leave of our office-bearers at the comparatively modern half-way 
house of 1830, that three of them, at least, had accompanied me 
all the way. They were Henry Mackenzie^ Baron Hume, and Sir 
William Miller of Glenlee. 
Long or short, however, as it may seem to us in reflection, the 
century has witnessed signal changes, and many momentous events 
have been crowded into it. Many stormy days and nights must have 
