Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/276

268 but a similar disturbance is set up elsewhere. In Antrim, at the middle of the tertiary epoch, there was a great center of physical disturbance. We all know that at the present time the earth's crust, at any rate, is quiet in Antrim, while the great centers of local disturbance are in Sicily, in Southern Italy, in the Andes and elsewhere. My experience of the British Association does not extend quite over a geological epoch, but it does go back rather longer than I care to think about; and when I first knew the British Association, the locus of disturbance in it was the geological section. All sorts of terrible things about the antiquity of the earth, and I know not what else, were being said there, which gave rise to terrible apprehensions. The whole world, it was thought, was coming to an end, just as I have no doubt that, if there were any human inhabitants of Antrim in the middle of the tertiary epoch, when those great lava streams burst out, they would not have had the smallest question that the whole universe was going to pieces. Well, the universe has not gone to pieces. Antrim is, geologically speaking, a very quiet place now, as well cultivated a place as one need see, and yielding abundance of excellent produce; and so, if we turn to the geological section, nothing can be milder than the proceedings of that admirable body. All the difficulties that they seemed to have encountered at first have died away, and statements that were the horrible paradoxes of that generation are now the commonplaces of school boys. At present the locus of disturbance is to be found in the biological section, and more particularly in the anthropological department of that section. History repeats itself, and precisely the same apprehensions which were expressed by the aborigines of the geological section, in long far back time, are at present expressed by those who attend our deliberations. The world is coming to an end, the basis of morality is being shaken, and I don't know what is not to happen if certain conclusions which appear probable are to be verified. Well, now, whoever may be here thirty years hence—I certainly shall not be—but, depend upon it, whoever may be speaking at the meeting of this department of the British Association thirty years hence will find, exactly as the members of the geological section have found, on looking back thirty years, that the very paradoxes and horrible conclusions, things that are now thought to be going to shake the foundations of the world, will by that time have become parts of every-day knowledge and will be taught in our schools as accepted truth, and nobody will be one whit the worse.

The considerations which I think it desirable to put before you, in order to show the foundations of this conviction at which I have very confidently arrived, are of two kinds. The first is a reason based entirely upon philosophical considerations, namely, this—that the region of pure physical science, and the region of those questions which