The daily morning journal and courier., 1899-10-12
THE ACADEMY'S CENTEN NAL

ENTISTS YESTERDAY.
 Notable Academies and Scientific Soci'
 cities Represented-AbIe Papers b,
 Prominent Members-Rcception in
 the Evening.
 The opening session of the centennial
 meeting of the Connecticut Academy of
 Arts and Sciences was held in North
 Sheffield hall of Yale university at
 o'clock yesterday afternoon. A notable
 gathering of scientific men was present,
 some of them from countries across the
 sea. Professor William H. Brewer,
 president of the academy, was on the
 platform and welcomed all present in
 the name of the academy.
 The session opened with the reading
 of communications from corresponding
 societies by Alexander w. Evans, Pm
 D., secretary of the academy. These
 were many in number, some from the most noted academies of Europe, yet all
 contained sentiments of admiration for
 the Connecticut academy, and closed with expressions of good will.
 The address of welcome was made by Lyman A. Mills, lieutenant governor of Connecticut, who, with Secretary Evans and Professor William North Rice, ILL D., of Wesleyan university, occupied chairs with Professor Brewer on the platform. Following him, Professor Brewer delivered an address on "The Debt of This Century to Learned Soci- eties." In it he discussed oonvfncingly the important part academies of science have played in the matter of education and the promotion of science as the me- dium of the diffusion of knowledge of science through the people.
 Learned societies." he said have long been a most important factor in conserving the knowledge gained in the past-more important in the advance ment of new knowledge, but probably most so in disseminating it and making it available. It has been, however, dur ing the century now closing that they have had their greatest effect in shap- ing the culture of mankind.
 Societies of one kind or another are now so very numerous, they embrace such a wide range of object, and they gather into them SO large a part of the men in all the countries of our modern civilization that they have come to be a leading and perhaps the most potent factor in the shaping and the directing of human activities, both material and Intellectual
 ''No line of separation can be drawn between those honored with the term learned societies, organized for the promotion of intellectual culture, and those designed for purely material or economic objects. Nor does the precise name indicate the intellectual status. Under the various names of academies, | societies, associations and clubs, they | shade through every grade, from organ izations for the promotion of pure sci ence and intellectual culture to those entirely material in their aims and ob- jects."
 Following Professor Brewer, Professor | Rice of Wesleyan delivered an address on Scientific Thought in the Nine- | teenth Century" The address was highly interesting, and at it's close the speaker was met with the enthusiastic pId uOilS Ol liio iiSeAi SiS' LII petl ib N's' as follows:
 PROFESSOR RICE'S ADDRESS.
 By far the greatest of the intellectual achievements of our age has been the development of the idea of unity of pro- cess prevailing the whole history of na ture The word, which sums up in itself the expression of the most characteris- tic and fruitful intellectual life of our age is the word evolution. The last half of our century has been so domi- mated by that idea in all It's thinking that it may we'll be named the Age of Evolution. We may give as the date of the beginning of that new epoch of in- tellectual history the year 1858, and the theses of the intellectual reformation of our times were the twin papers of Darwin and Wallace, wherein was promulgated the theory of natural selection.
 And yet, of course, the idea of evolu- ton was not new when these papers were presented to he Linnaean society. or unconsciously, the aim ,f science at all times must have been 70 bring events that seem isolated into l continuous development. To exclude he idea of evolution from any class of phenomena is to exclude that class of phenomena from the realm of science. In the first half of our century evolu- ionary conceptions of the history of inorganic nature had become pretty well established. The nebular hypothesis vas obviously a theory of planetary ev- ,lution. The Lyellian geology, which ook the place of the catastrophism of he last century, was the conception of .volution applied to the physiographic of the earth
 Nor had there been wanting antici- ,ations of evolution within the realm of ,iology. The author of that sublime Hebrew psalm of creation, preserved to IS as the first chapter of Genesis, was n his way a good deal of an evolution st. Let the earth bring forth, ''let he waters bring forth" are words that ( oint to process of growth rather than process of manufacture in the origina $ ion of living beings. In crude and l ague forms the idea of evolution ap- l i ears in some of the Greek philosophers. t ust at the beginning of our century ( amarck developed the idea of evolution 6 ito something like a scientifis theory. l ( ct no less true is it that the epoch of t in human thought began with Y