UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL NEWS.

PETER B. ROUSS, of New York, son of the late Charles Broadway Rouss, has established at the University of Virginia a memorial to his father by the erection of two adjunct professorships, one of civil, and one of mechanical engineering, to be supported by him, and to be known as the Rouss memorial adjunct professorships.

MR. THOMAS H. SHEVLIN has given $60,000 to the University of Minnesota for a woman's building, which will contain a gymnasium, a luncheon room, etc.

THE Liverpool City Council has agreed to grant a further sum of £10,000 to Liverpool University during the current year.

MR. J. E. CROMBIE has given £1,000 towards the cost of the Aberdeen University quartercentenary celebration, primarily to guarantee. any deficiency in the publication committee's

expenses.

THE University at Giessen will celebrate its three hundredth anniversary in May, 1907.

THE Agricultural Department of Clemson College has been reorganized as follows: First, the division devoted to teaching. Second, the division devoted to research work. Under the first head is included the teaching of students, farmers' institute work and extension work. The second division comprises the state experiment station and all lines of original research in the sciences relating to agriculture. The directorship of the station, which office has heretofore rested with the president of the college, has been transferred to the Agricultural Department. A station council has

been organized, presided over by the president

of the college. This council will meet once a month for the purpose of discussing questions relating to the good of the station and to determine in a general way what shall be the character of the experiments conducted for the coming year. The issuing of all bulletins must be authorized by the station council. All investigations must have the approval of this council. It consists of the president, the director, the professors of chemistry, agriculture, horticulture, entomology and zoology, botany and bacteriology, veterinary science,

Under

and animal husbandry and dairying. this organization, the following gentlemen comprize the Agricultural Department and are also employed in conducting experiments required by the experiment station. Professor J. N. Harper was elected to fill the place of director of the Agricultural Department and of the station, which post was vacated by the resignation of Professor J. S. Newman, on July 1. Professor Harper comes from the Kentucky state institution. The chair of animal husbandry and dairying has been filled by the election of Professor John Michaels, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. Professor C. L. Newman, who has recently been elected to the associate professorship of agriculture, was for some years connected with the experiment station at Arkansas.

PROFESSOR W. A. TILDEN, F.R.S., has been appointed dean of the Royal College of Science, South Kensington, in succession to Professor J. W. Judd, F.R.S.

DR. WILLIAM M. HICKS, F.R.S., principal and professor of physics in Sheffield University, has resigned the post of vice-chancellor, and is succeeded by Sir Charles Norton Edgecumbe Eliot.

PROFESSOR E. J. TOWNSEND, of the University of Illinois, has been made acting dean of the College of Science.

DR. ALBERT LEFEVRE, of Tulane University, has been appointed professor of philosophy in the University of Virginia.

PROFESSOR S. J. BUCK has retired from the chair of mathematics at Iowa College, after forty-one years of service. He has been made

professor emeritus. Mr. W. J. Rusk, for the past three years associate professor, has been promoted to the chair of mathematics.

MISS MARY C. BLISS, for the past year assistant in botany in Wellesley College, has been advanced to an instructorship, and the following new appointments have been made in the department: Assistant, Miss Maude Cipperly; graduate student assistants, Miss Alice M. Ottley and Miss Emeline Moore.

DR. AUGUST GUTZMAR, professor of mathematics at Jena, has been called to Halle.

BARTHOLOMEU DIAZ, the discoverer of the Cape of Storms, spent sixteen months on his voyage, and the little flotilla of Vasco da Gama, sailing from Lisbon on July 8, 1497, only reached the Cape in the middle of November. These bold men, sailing in their puny fishing-smacks to unknown lands, met the perils of the sea and the attacks of savages with equal courage. How great was the danger of such a voyage may be gathered from the fact that less than half the men who sailed with da Gama lived to return to Lisbon. Four hundred and eight years have passed since that voyage, and a ship of 13,000 tons has just brought us here, in safety and luxury, in but little more than a fortnight.

How striking are the contrasts presented by these events! On the one hand compare the courage, the endurance and the persistence of the early navigators with the little that has been demanded of us; on the other hand consider how much man's power over the forces of nature has been augmented during the past four centuries. The capacity for heroism is probably undiminished, but certainly the occasions are now rarer when it is demanded of us. If we are heroes, at least but few of us ever find it out, and, when we read stories of ancient feats of courage, it is hard to prevent an uneasy thought that, notwithstanding our

boasted mechanical inventions, we are perhaps degenerate descendants of our great. predecessors.

Yet the thought that to-day is less romantic and less heroic than yesterday has its consolation, for it means that the lot of man is easier than it was. Mankind, indeed, may be justly proud that this improvement has been due to the successive efforts of each generation to add to the heritage of knowledge handed down to it by its predecessors, whereby we have been born to the accumulated endowment of centuries of genius and labor.

I am told that in the United States the phrase 'I want to know' has lost the simple meaning implied by the words, and has become a mere exclamation of surprise. Such a conventional expression could hardly have gained currency except amongst a people who aspire to knowledge. The dominance of the European race in America, Australasia and South Africa has no doubt arisen from many causes, but amongst these perhaps the chief one is that not only do we want to know,' but also that we are determined to find out. And now within the last quarter of a century we have welcomed into the ranks of those who want to know' an oriental race, which has already proved itself strong in the peaceful arts of knowledge.

I take it, then, that you have invited us because you want to know what is worth knowing; and we are here because we want to know you, to learn what you have to tell us, and to see that South Africa of which we have heard so much.

The hospitality which you are offering us is so lavish, and the journeys which you have organized are so extensive, that the cynical observer might be tempted to describe our meeting as the largest picnic on record. Although we intend to enjoy our picnic with all our hearts, yet I should like

to tell the cynic, if he is here, that perhaps the most important object of these conferences is the opportunity they afford for personal intercourse between men of like minds who live at the remotest corners of the earth.

We shall pass through your land with the speed and the voracity of a flight of locusts; but, unlike the locust, we shall, I hope, leave behind us permanent fertilization in the form of stimulated scientific and educational activity. And this result will ensue whether or not we who have come from Europe are able worthily to sustain the lofty part of prophets of science. We shall try our best to play to your satisfaction on the great stage upon which you call on us to act, and if when we are gone you shall, amongst yourselves, pronounce the performance a poor one, yet the fact will remain, that the meeting has embodied in a material form the desire that the progress of this great continent shall not be merely material; and such an aspiration secures its own fulfilment. However small may be the tangible results of our meeting, we shall always be proud to have been associated with you in your efforts for the advancement of science.

We do not know whether the last hundred years will be regarded forever as the sæculum mirabile of discovery, or whether it is but the prelude to yet more marvelous centuries. To us living men, who scarcely pass a year of our lives without witnessing some new marvel of discovery or invention, the rate at which the development of knowledge proceeds is truly astonishing; but from a wider point of view the scale. of time is relatively unimportant, for the universe is leisurely in its procedure. Whether the changes which we witness be fast or slow, they form a part of a long sequence of events which begin in some past of immeasurable remoteness and tend

to some end which we can not foresee. It must always be profoundly interesting to the mind of man to trace successive cause and effect in the chain of events which make up the history of the earth and all that lives on it, and to speculate on the origin and future fate of animals, and of planets, suns and stars. I shall try, then, to set forth in my address some of the attempts which have been made to formulate evolutionary speculation. This choice of a subject has, moreover, been almost forced on me by the scope of my own scientific work, and it is, I think, justified by the name which I bear. It will be my fault and your misfortune if I fail to convey to you some part of the interest which is naturally inherent in such researches.

The man who propounds a theory of evolution is attempting to reconstruct the history of the past by means of the circumstantial evidence afforded by the present. The historian of man, on the other hand, has the advantage over the evolutionist in that he has the written records of the past on which to rely. The discrimination of the truth from amongst discordant records is frequently a work demanding the highest qualities of judgment; yet when this end is attained it remains for the historian to convert the arid skeleton of facts into a living whole by clothing it with the flesh of human motives and impulses. For this part of his task he needs much of that power of entering into the spirit of other men's lives which goes to the making of a poet. Thus the historian should possess not only the patience of the man of science in the analysis of facts, but also the imagination of the poet to grasp what the facts have meant. Such a combination is rarely to be found in equal perfection on both sides, and it would not be hard to analyze the works of great historians so as to see which quality was predominant in each of them.

The evolutionist is spared the surpassing difficulty of the human element, yet he also needs imagination, although of a different character from that of the historian. In its lowest form his imagination is that of the detective who reconstructs the story of a crime; in its highest it demands the power of breaking loose from all the trammels of convention and education, and of imagining something which has never occurred to the mind of man before. In every case the evolutionist must form a thecry for the facts before him, and the great theorist is only to be distinguished from the fantastic fcol by the sobriety of his judgment-a distinction, however, sufficient to make one rare and the other only too common.

The test of a scientific theory lies in the number of facts which it groups into a connected whole; it ought besides to be fruitful in pointing the way to the discovery and coordination of new and previously unsuspected facts. Thus a good theory is in effect a cyclopedia of knowledge, susceptible of indefinite extension by the addition of supplementary volumes.

Hardly any theory is all true, and many are not all false. A theory may be essentially at fault and yet point the way to truth, and so justify its temporary existence. We should not, therefore, totally reject one or other of two rival theories on the ground that they seem, with our present knowledge, mutually inconsistent, for it is likely that both may contain important elements of truth. The theories of which I shall have to speak hereafter may often appear discordant with one another according to our present lights. Yet we must not scruple to pursue the several divergent lines of thought to their logical conclusions, relying on future discovery to eliminate the false and to reconcile together the truths which form part of each of them.

In the mouths of the unscientific evolu

tion is often spoken of as almost synonymous with the evolution of the various species of animals on the earth, and this again is sometimes thought to be practically the same thing as the theory of natural selection. Of course those who are conversant with the history of scientific ideas are aware that a belief in the gradual and orderly transformation of nature, both animate and inanimate, is of great antiquity.

We may liken the facts on which theories of evolution are based to a confused heap of beads, from which a a keen-sighted searcher after truth picks out and strings together a few which happen to catch his eye, as possessing certain resemblances. Until recently, theories of evolution in both realms of nature were partial and discontinuous, and the chains of facts were correspondingly short and disconnected. At length the theory of natural selection, by formulating the cause of the divergence of forms in the organic world from the parental stock, furnished the naturalist with a clue by which he examined the disordered mass of facts before him, and he was thus enabled to go far in deducing order where chaos had ruled before, but the problem of reducing the heap to perfect order will probably baffle the ingenuity of the investigator forever.

So illuminating has been this new idea that, as the whole of nature has gradually been reexamined by its aid, thousands of new facts have been brought to light, and have been strung in due order on the neckIndeed, the transforlace of knowledge.

mation resulting from the new point of view has been so far-reaching as almost to justify the misapprehension of the unscientific as to the date when the doctrines of evolution first originated in the mind of

man.

It is not my object, nor indeed am I competent, to examine the extent to which

the theory of natural selection has needed modification since it was first formulated by my father and Wallace. But I am surely justified in maintaining that the general principle holds its place firmly as a permanent acquisition to modes of thought.

Evolutionary doctrines concerning inanimate nature, although of much older date than those which concern life, have been profoundly affected by the great impulse of which I have spoken. It has thus come about that the origin and history of the chemical elements and of stellar systems now occupy a far larger space in the scientific mind than was formerly the case. The subject which I shall discuss to-night is the extent to which ideas parallel to those which have done so much towards elucidating the problems of life, hold good also in the world of matter; and I believe that it will be possible to show that in this respect there exists a resemblance between the two realms of nature, which is not merely fanciful. It is proper to add that as long ago as 1873 Baron Karl du Prel discussed the same subject from a similar point of view, in a book entitled "The Struggle for Life in the Heavens.'1

Although inanimate matter moves under the action of forces which are incomparably simpler than those governing living beings, yet the problems of the physicist and the astronomer are scarcely less complex than those which present themselves to the biologist. The mystery of life remains as impenetrable as ever, and in his evolutionary speculations the biologist does not attempt to explain life itself, but, adopting as his unit the animal as a whole, discusses its relationships to other animals and to the surrounding conditions. The physicist, on the other hand, is irresistibly impelled to form theories as to the intimate

1Der Kampf um's Dasein am Himmel (zweite Auflage), Denicke, Berlin, 1876.