THE PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 191 
tion of the true student, more than counterbalance any inconvenience 
or passing annoyance that may be felt by the rank and file of pseudo- 
philosophers; men who are better pleased to discuss, sometimes in 
flippant style, the discoveries of others—tamquam modo ex deorum 
concilio et ex Epicuri intermundiis descendissent—than to spend time 
and patience in the careful verification, or the laborious refutation, 
of the results of which they speak so lightly. 
Certainly the address before us was not intended for such as these. 
It is characterised by a minuteness of detail and closeness of rea- 
soning which at once excite our admiration, and test our power of 
continued and prolonged attention. It is also characterised by what 
seems to be a leading feature in modern scientific enquiry, fearless- 
ness in adopting any conclusion which is assumed to be inevitable, 
with perhaps something like haste in reaching the assumption that 
it is so. This doubtless is the result of the breadth and candour 
which belong to those to whom everything in heaven or on earth 
is an open question, and whose readiness to accept a conclusion, 
however hypothetical, is only equalled by their eagerness to reject 
it as soon as it is proved by later discoveries to be untenable. No 
one can grudge our savans such liberty, but we may bespeak their 
forbearance towards others who, still trammelled with scientific 
beliefs which would make the new garment both cumbersome and 
incongruous, are thereby made as willing to wait for a still newer 
fashion, as at once to assume that which is offered as the latest and 
most approved. 
Dr. Thompson took as his subject the ‘‘ Development of the 
Forms of Animal Life,’’ and he avows himself at the outset a firm 
follower of Charles Darwin. He holds that ‘‘ the cautious natura- 
list receives with the greatest reserve ’’—by which we understand 
that he does not receive it at all—‘‘the statement of fixed and 
permanent specific characters as belonging to the different forms of 
organized beings, and is fully persuaded of the constant tendency 
to variation which all species show even in the present condition of 
the earth, and of the still greater liability to change which must 
have existed in the earlier periods of its formation ;’ that, ‘so far 
from being the direct product of distinct acts of creation, the 
various forms of plants and animals have been gradually evolved 
in.a slow gradation of increasing complexity . . . . in the long but 
incalculable lapse of the earth’s natural mutations.” 
The note thus struck is maintained throughout, and consciously 
