The Royal Society of Edinburgh

Abstract

AT the meeting of this Society on the 4th inst., the President, Lord Moncreiff, delivered an address on “The Past Hundred Years' History of the Society.” Regarding this long interval, Lord Moncreiff said: “From the watch-tower of the Royal Society I can trace within the century a revolution more wonderful and more extensive than monarchs, or empires, or republics can display. Since this Society held its first meeting, how great to the community has been the fruit gathered from those branches of knowledge which it was incorporated to prosecute! During that interval, what has science not done for human comfort and happiness? What interest so great, what dwelling so humble, as not to have felt its beneficent influence? Since the invention of the art of printing, no such advance in material comfort, prosperity, and intelligence has ever been made within a similar period as this century has witnessed. Its triumphs have not been confined to the more abstruse fields of thought and study, but have come straight to the world of every-day life. One homely illustration meets me on the threshold of the opening night, and homely things go deep into the foundations of human life. I picture to myself our founders wending their way to the College Library, through close and wynd, in mid-winter 1783, while flickering oil lamps made the darkness visible without, and a detestable tallow candle made the student miserable within doors. Those who cannot recollect the universal reign of tallow candles and their sufferers, cannot appreciate how much the sum of human enjoyment has been enhanced, and the tranquillity of human temper increased, by the transmutation—partial, we must admit—of darkness into light. There has been, I believe, no more potent agent in humanising the denizens of our large cities than the flood of light which chemical science has in our day poured into their recesses. Prophets tell us that, before the end of the century which we now begin, gaslight will probably have followed the tallow candle into the sane unlamented obscurity; but, even should this be so, history will carry to its credit the vast amount of public utility, and the many hours of useful employment or comfort in the factory, the study, or the sick-room, which this simple application of chemical science gained in its day for the n;n;teenth century. But the dispersion of material darkness is but a slender illustration of the triumphs of scientific discovery. Time and space are no longer the tyrants they were in 1783. I rather think that when our founders first met they could hardly hope to hear by post from London under ten days, as Palmer's mail-coaches had not begun to run until 1789. It would be an interesting inquiry, if my limits permitted, to trace the moral and sacial effects of the change from the days when a London letter took even three days to reach Edinburgh, and cost 131/2d.—the pre-Macadamite days, when twenty miles a day was a fair posting rate on any roads but the main thoroughfares. Lord Cockburn lamented over the prospect of Lon Ion being within fifteen hours of Edinburgh, as endangering the characteristics of our social community. His sagacity was not altogether at fault, but even that time has been reduced by a third, and I rather think we and the world are all the better for the change. But although larger victories were in store for the century, they came slowly. Both Boulton and James Watt were original members of the Royal Society, but it was more than thirty years before steam navigation became general, and more than fifty before the first passenger railway train ran in Scotland. No doubt, in 1791, Erasmus Darwin, in his ‘Botanic Garden,’ a poem too little read, had exclaimed in the well-known lines:—