at surround not only mankind
but all life, both in the present and the past. We search, we peer, we
see things dimly; here and there we get a ray of clear vision, as we
look before and after. We study the tremendous procession of the ages,
from the immemorial past when in "cramp elf and saurian forms" the
creative forces "swathed their too-much power," down to the yesterday,
a few score thousand years distant only, when the history of man
became the overwhelming fact in the history of life on this planet;
and studying, we see strange analogies in the phenomena of life and
death, of birth, growth, and change, between those physical groups of
animal life which we designate as species, forms, races, and the
highly complex and composite entities which rise before our minds when
we speak of nations and civilizations.

It is this study which has given science its present-day prominence.
In the world of intellect, doubtless, the most marked features in the
history of the past century have been the extraordinary advances in
scientific knowledge and investigation, and in the position held by
the men of science with reference to those engaged in other pursuits.
I am not now speaking of applied science; of the science, for
instance, which, having revolutionized transportation on the earth and
the water, is now on the brink of carrying it into the air; of the
science that finds its expression in such extraordinary achievements
as the telephone and the telegraph; of the sciences which have so
accelerated the velocity of movement in social and industrial
conditions--for the changes in the mechanical appliances of ordinary
life during the last three generations have been greater than in all
the preceding generations since history dawned. I speak of the science
which has no more direct bearing upon the affairs of our everyday life
than literature or music, painting or sculpture, poetry or history. A
hundred years ago the ordinary man of cultivation had to know
something of these last subjects; but the probabilities were rather
against his having any but the most superficial scientific knowledge.
At present all this has changed, thanks to the interest taken in
scientific discoveries, the large circulation of scientific books, and
the rapidity with which ideas originating among students of the most
advanced and abstruse sciences become, at least partially, domiciled
in the popular mind.

Another feature of the change, of the growth in