INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
798 
see you work for something altogether beyond and above 
this if you have any hope of succeeding, making a mark for 
yourselves in the course of your practice. 
If you are rightly occupied, you may depend upon it 
that your recreation will grow very easily out of your 
work ; and have you not after all a grand subject for con¬ 
templation ? Not only in all that relates to your own 
profession, not only in the interest which you will expe¬ 
rience in tracing out the minute elements of the animal 
body in ransacking as it were the material world, and 
finding all that you desire, not only in the satisfaction 
which you will experience in counteracting outbreaks of 
disease and relieving suffering animals ; but have you not 
the whole universe spread out for your observation, the earth 
with its trees, and forests, and fields, rich with fruitful grain ? 
Have you not the clear streams, “ with every wave crested 
with healing as though they ran troubled of angels” ? Have 
you not the mountains sending their summits into the azure 
beyond ? and have you not, above all, that untroubled and 
sacred sky opening straight through its veils of mist and 
curtains of dew into the awfulness of the eternal world, 
where every cloud that passes is literally the chariot of an 
angel, and every ray of morning light streams from the throne 
of God” ? 
If you will he content to seek your recreation in the study 
of the works of the natural world, you will find that you have 
a never-failing source of keenest delight. But in doing 
this, let me warn you not to fall into the black abyss of 
materialism. 
Your scientific studies will naturally compel you to con¬ 
centrate your attention mainly upon matter, but you are not 
therefore bound to become mentally blind to the existence 
of a spirit world. It is strange that the grand achievements 
of modern science should have for their object the association 
of human nature with the brute, that one of the highest 
triumphs of the greatest investigator of modern times should 
he to connect man with an arboreal monkey. Do you want 
to know what the evolution theory amounts to? Let me read 
to you the words of Professor Dawson, not unmixed with 
irony, as he describes it here. He says :— 
tc It introduces us first to an ape, akin perhaps to the modern 
orang or gorilla, but unknown to us as yet by any actual 
remains. This creature after living for an indefinite time in 
the rich forests of the Miocene and earlier Pliocene periods, 
was at length subjected to the gradually increasing rigors 
of the Glacial age. Its vegetable food and its leafy shelter 
