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.

Art and Science in their widest sense cover nearly the whole field of man’s intellectual action.  They are the outward and visible expressions of two distinct and supplementary portions of our complex human nature—­distinct, but not opposed, the one working by the dry light of the intellect, the other in the warm glow of the emotions; the one ever seeking to interpret and express the beauty of the universe, the other ever searching for its truth.  One vast personality in the course of history, and one only, seems to have embraced them both. ["Hear!  Hear!”] That transcendent genius died three days ago plus three hundred and sixty-nine years—­Leonardo da Vinci.

Emerson describes an artist who could never paint a rock until he had first understood its geological structure; and the late Lord Houghton told me that an illustrious living poet once destroyed some exquisite verses on a flower because on examination he found that his botany was wrong.  This is not saying that all the geology in the world, or all the botany in the world, could create an artist.