THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 
127 
sight of the colossus ! My eyes the first which beheld it. Who 
shall ever see them lit up with the same unmitigated enthusiasm 
again ? The heat, did I say ? yea, the heat of the blessed sun ; 
for by that was dried up against the brick walls of my workshop 
the acacian gum with which I succeeded in reintegrating it." 
Then again, in describing the find of the Ichthyosaurian Chiro- 
20olyostinus, and speaking of its extremities, he writes, "No words 
can express my sense of these two paddles " (the fore and hind 
limbs are converted into swimming paddles). " What a multitude 
of pentameters belong to these ossicular strings, every one of 
them worth a necklace of oriental pearls. These paddles are 
exquisitely beautiful — they are Nature's own mosaic." 
Perhaps all this is too much in the style of Buffon — too general, 
and not sufficiently accurate and descriptive for the present race of 
naturalists. Still it shows the enthusiasm of the man and the 
interest he took in the pursuit of Natural Science. It appears 
that he was a man of considerable property, so that his work was 
done entirely for the love of science. His collection of Icthyosauri, 
et hoc genus o?nne, are now in the Natural History Museum at 
South Kensington, where his book on the Great Sea Dragons, as 
he calls them, may be consulted. 
He was very much annoyed by the way in which fine specimens 
were often destroyed by quarrymen and others. He thus describes 
a colloquy between two quarrymen over the Triatarsostinus, a 
portion of which he rescued from their destroying grasp : 
"Quarryman No. One says, 'I wonder what 't is 1 A viery 
dragenn, a maa be.' 
" Quarryman No. Two, ' One that stinged Moses, a maa be. 
Here 's at 'un ! ' " And so they smashed it. 
The enthusiasm and the perseverance of such men as Mr. 
Hawkins, although not much known to general fame, is well 
worthy of being emulated. 
I often think that in the race after something new, the desire 
to learn or know some new thing, we are very apt to forget what 
has been done by men who have laid the very foundation-stones 
of our present knowledge. Take, for example, such a man as 
Descartes. I suspect that there are but few of the fairly well- 
informed people of the present time who have anything but a 
vague idea of his work. Yet there is no doubt that, next perhaps 
to our own Newton, he laid the foundation of much of our 
