try" is perpetually exemplified in
practice. And at the Royal Society, to match the great figures that were
upon the scene a century before, there are such men as the eccentric
Cavendish, the profound Wollaston, the marvellously versatile Priestley,
and the equally versatile and even keener-visioned Rumford. Here, too,
are Herschel, who is giving the world a marvellous insight into the
constitution of the universe; and Hutton, who for the first time gains a
clear view of the architecture of our earth's crust; and Jenner, who is
rescuing his fellow-men from the clutches of the most deadly of plagues;
to say nothing of such titanic striplings as Young and Davy, who are
just entering the scientific lists. With such a company about us we are
surely justified in feeling that the glory of England as a scientific
centre has not dimmed in these first hundred and thirty years of the
Royal Society's existence.

And now, as we view the radiometer, the scene shifts by yet another
century, and we come out of cloud-land and into our own proper age. We
are at the close of the nineteenth century--no, I forget, we are fairly
entering upon the twentieth. Need I say that these again are troublous
times? Man still wages warfare on his fellow-man as he has done time
out of mind; as he will do--who shall say how long? But meantime, as
of yore, the men of science have kept steadily on their course. But
recently here at the Royal Society were seen the familiar figures of
Darwin and Lyell and Huxley and Tyndall. Nor need we shun any comparison
with the past while the present lists can show such names as Wallace,
Kelvin, Lister, Crookes, Foster, Evans, Rayleigh, Ramsay, and Lock-yer.
What revolutionary advances these names connote! How little did those
great men of the closing decades of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries know of the momentous truths of organic evolution for which
the names of Darwin and Wallace and Huxley stand! How little did
they know a century ago, despite Hutton's clear prevision, of these
marvellous slow revolutions through which, as Lyell taught us, the
earth's crust had been built up! Not even Jen-ner could foresee a
century ago the revolution in surgery which has been effected in our
generation through the teachings of Lister.

And what did Rumford and Davy know of energy in its various
manifestations as compared with the knowledge of to-day, of Crookes
and Rayleigh and Ramsay and Kelvin? What would Joseph Priest