The Presidential Address. 
77 
appearance,” says Lyell, 11 “it gave, as Professor Huxley 
truly said, ‘ a new direction to biological speculation,’ for 
even where it failed to make proselytes, it gave a shock to 
old and time-honoured opinions, from which they have never 
since recovered. It effected this not merely by the manner 
in which it explained how new races and species might be 
formed by Natural Selection, but also by showing that, if we 
assume the principle, much light is thrown on many very 
distinct and otherwise unconnected classes of phenomena, 
both in the present condition and past history of the organic 
world.” In the year 1869, at a meeting of the Herman 
“ Naturforscher Versammlung,” a society analogous to our 
British Association, Prof. Helmholtz—of world-wide fame as 
mathematician, physicist, chemist, and physiologist—in his 
opening address at Innsbruck, in reviewing the doctrine of 
Natural Selection, said, “ Darwin’s theory contains an 
essentially new creative thought,” 12 a dictum which is all the 
more weighty as coming from one who has himself obtained 
such a many-sided and profound insight into Nature’s laws. 
But tempting as is this theme, time compels me to refrain 
from any further reference to contemporary scientific 
opinions on the Darwinian theory. It will suffice to say, in 
the words of its illustrious author,—“ Now things are wholly 
changed, and almost every naturalist admits the great 
principle of evolution.” 13 On the very last occasion that I 
had the pleasure of an interview with Mr. Darwin, he said 
that he looked upon the ‘ Origin ’ as a book of the past; it 
had done its work, and might now be shelved. But here, as 
in many other cases, his inborn modesty led him to under¬ 
value his own work, and I feel confident that I express the 
views of every worker in biology when I say that for many 
years hence the ‘ Origin of Species’ will be at hand as a 
repository of carefully digested facts, and a storehouse of 
suggestions for future work. 
Now the theory of species established by Darwin is 
11 < Principles of Geology,’ 12th ed., yoI. ii., pp. 281, 282, 
12 ‘ Popular Scientific Lectures,’ 1878, p. 385, 
13 < Origin,’ 6th ed., p. 424, 
