Society, and I shall be glad if it will return to its first practice, and send in annually a report of its proceedings to form part of our Transactions. I am not competent to review the contents of the papers on natural history. That by Mr. Gillies was an exhaustive one, and the interest it excited says more for it than any praise I could bestow. Such papers as this, or Captain Hutton's "On the Modifications in the Capsules of Mosses," or Professor Coughtrey "On New Zealand Hydroida," are what we need above all things to stir up a greater interest in natural history amongst us, and I am sorry that they were not read to far larger audiences. For it is indeed still as true as ever it was that a large proportion of our fellow-men look upon the pursuit of natural history as mere trifling and curiosity hunting. They are willing to accord their suffrages of applause to a Spencer or a Darwin because the great generalisations in connection with which their names are known affect systems of philosophy, attack old-established notions, and impress the minds of all with the grandeur of their simplicity. At the same time they utterly forget, or rather they are for the most part ignorant of the fact, that it is only as a consequence of the unwearied industry of the humbler votaries of natural history that the mass of knowledge has been accumulated which has formed, as it were, the raw material out of which the great biological theories now passing into general acceptance have been woven. The hunter for new forms may seem to be a mere curiosity hunter. He who dissects and describes a bit of sea-weed from the shore may seem to be but a learned trifler. Nevertheless, the great doctrine of evolution, with which all the thought of the civilised world is busy, is but the direct descendant of the labours of such men. It is through their work that we have obtained our knowledge of the forms and characteristics of the world of organisms, which beforehand appeared only as a chaos of heterogeneous forms having no relation amongst themselves beyond that of preying upon and becoming the prey of one another. To some it may appear that I say nothing in honour of the work of the naturalist when I claim for it the patronage of the philosophy of the day. I know it is stigmatised as irreligious by at least half the civilised world, and looked upon with suspicion or accepted half-heartedly by a large proportion of the other half. This is the subject to which I should have liked to have devoted this address.
The alleged conflict of religion and science has been the theme of a thousand addresses, but it still remains an unexhausted subject, because its aspects change from generation to generation, and even in our time, from year to year, so that what is well said to-day is useless or stale to-morrow. I need not contend before such an audience as I speak to to-night, that there is no conflict between science and religion. The constant warfare of words that is going on throughout the world lies between religious knowledge and religious ignorance. There may be persons in the world who have become irreligious, as a result of their scientific acquirements, but it may be said of them, with certainty, that the temperament which led to their being thus influenced in spite of their culture would have made them irreligious still more surely had they remained uninstructed. It is a very painful thing to see men who are utterly without instruction on the subjects they deal with standing up to condemn the most cultured and most truly religious men of the age as irreligious and dangerous teachers. Even in this out-of-the-way corner of the earth, the Ultima Thule of civilisation, we find these Prophets of the Baal of Ignorance loftily criticising and condemning a philosophy whose foundations are utterly unknown to them, whose facts they misapprehend, whose arguments they misunderstand or misapply, whose conclusions even they have not taken the pains properly to acquaint themselves with. It is my one regret on vacating this chair that I have been