Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z
History
Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z
Speeches, addresses, etc.
But, deficient as one's knowledge of evolution, scientifically and in
detail, may be, he may have attained to a not unintelligent perception
of the all-embracing creative process called by that name as that in
which, in the whole range of the advancing universal movement of life,
what is ascends from what was, and fulfils it.
And what I wish to say for my last word is, that whoever of us in
tracing back along the line of its potent and fruitful sources that
which is his noblest heritage as an American and a member of the English
race, leaves out that hard-featured forefather of ours on the shore of
Massachusetts Bay in the seventeenth century, and makes not large
account of the tremendous fight he fought which was reflected in the
face he wore, misses a chief explanation of the fortune to which we and
our children are born. [Loud applause.]
JOHN TYNDALL
ART AND SCIENCE
[Speech of Professor John Tyndall at the annual banquet of the
Royal Academy, London, May 5, 1888. The toast to Science was
coupled with that to Literature, to the latter of which William E.
H. Lecky was called upon to respond. In introducing Professor
Tyndall, the President, Sir Frederic Leighton, said: "On behalf of
Science, on whom could I call more fitly than on my old friend
Professor Tyndall. ["Hear! Hear!"] Fervid in imagination, after the
manner of his race, clothing thoughts luminous and full of color in
a sharply chiselled form, he seems to me to be, in very deed, an
artist and our kin; and I, as an artist, rejoice to see that in
this priest within the temple of Science, Knowledge has not clipped
the wings of wonder, and that to him the tint of Heaven is not the
less lovely that he can reproduce its azure in a little phial, nor
does, because Science has been said to unweave it, the rainbow lift
its arc less triumphantly in the sky."]
YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS, MY LORDS, AND GENTLEMEN: Faraday, whose
standing in the science of the world needs not to be insisted on, used
to say to me that he knew of only two festivals that gave him real
pleasure. He loved to meet, on Tower Hill, the frank and genial
gentlemen-sailors of the Trinity House; but his crowning enjoyment was
the banquet of the Royal Academy. The feeling thus expressed by Faraday
is a representative feeling: for surely it is a high pleasure to men of
science to mingle annually in this illustrious throng, and it is an
honor and a pleasure to hear the toast of Science so cordially proposed
and so warmly responded to year after year.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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