DARWIN CENTENARY.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIC, Issue 13979, 14 August 1909, Page 7

DARWIN CENTENARY.

THE CAMBRIDGE GATHERING. A special correspondent of the London "Daily Chronicle' 1 thus describes the gathering at Cambridge in honour of Charles Darwin: — To-night, in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, there is a groat gathering of professors and men of science who are being received bv "Lord Rayleigli, Chancellor of the. ITnivorsitv. It is a remarkable assembly. These men liavo come to the Darwin celebration from all our universities and from great universities in the United States, South America, Africa, Australia, Canada, Egypt. India, New Zealand, the Straits Settlement, Belgnim. Denmark, France Germany Holland, Italy. Japan, Norway, Sweden, Russia, and Switzerland.

Those countries nro not represented bv one prof"=For onlv. but by dozens. p rom the United States of America, for instance, there are nearly forty flelegates. nnd from Germany thirty. These men have come as witnesses fro™! all the countrios of the world in which •i.„ n f T)nrwin is reverenced and from laboratories where men are engaged upon lilies of research first laid down in the "Origin of Species." Biologists. botanists, geologists, zoologists entomologists, and chemists are here in hundreds. Old men whose eyes have grown dim over the microscope, young men whose keen eyes are searching out the secrets of those great mysteries of organic life across the threshold of which the footsteps of science have only just passed a pace or two, men ivho in one lield or another are collecting facts from which deductions are being made with ail audacity of farreaching theories which would have made Darwin himself faint with surprise—these professors and doctors of science assembled in the Fitzwilliam Aluseum this evening to do homage by ;heir presence to the memory of Dar- • :> - tue leaders of contemporary scientific research and the teachers of Jic younger school, among whom are perhaps pioneers destined to explore new worlds now lying beyond our ken. Looking round on tins assembly, on those grey-headed, bald-headed, spectacled old gentlemen, or those younger •lien, "s/ckud o'er with the pale cast af thought," 011 men of all-rnations, vigorous, alert, and kedn, who have .set fortn on the quest of knowledge, one asked oneself the question, What would Darwin say if he stood among them to-night 'i Much ink has been ispilt since the "Origin of Species" lirsD startled the worlu. Thousands of new facts have been collected, thousands of theories been challenged each other, and what were heretical opinions then have become the elements of oldl'ashioned orthodoxy. Many of Darwin's own modestly expressed theories have been contested, and sonic of the disprovifJ. Modern biologists have gone far away from the first principles of the theory of evolution.

If Charles Darwin were here with us to-night among this company which represents the most briliant intellects in the whole world of science he would in his great humility be abashed by his own ignorance! And yet his'glory remains outshining like a. sun on all the brilliant little achievements of his successors, for it was his work which opened ui> the new world of biological knowledge and gave inspiration to those who followed in his steps.