THE SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATOR. 95 



their infinite diversity. The assembling of such a body as now fills 

 this hall was scarcely possible in any preceding generation, and is 

 made possible now only through the agency of science itself. It differs 

 from all preceding international meetings by the universality of its 

 scope, which aims to include the whole of knowledge. It is also unique 

 in that none but leaders have been sought out as members. It is 

 unique in that so many lands have delegated their choicest intellects 

 to carry on its work. They come from the country to which our 

 republic is indebted for a third of its territory, including the ground 

 on which we stand; from the land which has taught us that the most 

 scholarly devotion to the languages and learning of the cloistered past 

 is compatible with leadership in the practicable application of modern 

 science to the arts of life; from the island whose language and litera- 

 ture have found a new field and a vigorous growth in this region; 

 from the last seat of the holy Eoman Empire ; from the country which, 

 boasting of the only monarch that ever made an astronomical observa- 

 tion at the Greenwich Observatory, has enthroned science in one of 

 the highest places in its government; from the peninsula so learned 

 that we have invited one of its scholars to come here and teach us 

 our own language; from the land which gave birth to Leonardo, 

 Galileo, Torricelli, Columbus, Volta — what an array of immortal 

 names ! — from the little republic of glorious history which, breeding 

 men rugged as its eternal snow-peaks, has yet been the seat of scientific 

 investigation since the day of the Bernoullis; from the land whose 

 heroic dwellers did not hesitate to use the ocean itself to protect it 

 against invaders, and which now makes us marvel at the amount of 

 erudition compressed within its little area; from the nation of the 

 farthest east, which, by half a century of unequaled progress in the 

 arts of life, has made an important contribution to evolutionary sci- 

 ence through demonstrating the falsity of the theory that the most 

 ancient races are doomed to be left in the rear of the advancing age — 

 in a word, from every great center of intellectual activity on the globe 

 I see before me eminent representatives of that world-advance which 

 we have come to celebrate. 



Gentlemen and scholars all ! You do not visit our shores to find 

 great collections in which long centuries of humanity have given 

 expression on canvas and in marble to their hopes, fears and aspira- 

 tions. Nor do you expect institutions and buildings hoary with age. 

 But as you feel the vigor latent in the fresh air of these expansive 

 prairies, which has collected the products of human genius by which 

 we are here surrounded and, I may add, brought us together — as you 

 study the institutions which we have founded for the benefit not only 

 of our own people but of humanity at large; as you meet the men who, 

 in the short space of one century, have transformed this valley from 

 a savage wilderness into what it is to-day — then may you find com- 

 pensation for the want of a past like yours by seeing with prophetic 



