i2 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



rations for the work of the congress. Eesponses followed by the 

 honorary vice-presidents. England was represented, in the absence of 

 Mr. Bryce, by Sir William Bamsay, K.C.B., professor in the Eoyal 

 •Institution of London, who stands in the forefront among inorganic 

 chemists, distinguished by his discovery of argon and several other 

 new chemical elements. M. Gaston Darboux, perpetual secretary of 

 the Earis Academy of Sciences, one of the most original and profound 

 inquirers in the field of modern geometry, spoke for France in the 

 French language. Germany's spokesman was the venerable and vener- 

 ated anatomist, the eminent Erofessor Wilhelm Waldeyer of the Uni- 

 versity of Berlin, who spoke in the language in which he has ad- 

 dressed two generations of medical students who have become leaders 

 in the science of their profession. Dr. Oskar Backlund, director of 

 the Eussian Observatory at Fulkowa, which he has made famous by 

 his celebrated astronomical measurements, expressed the greetings of 

 Eussia in English. Erofessor Theodor Escherich, the renowned Vien- 

 nese pediatrician, spoke in German on behalf of Austria. Senior 

 Attilio Brunialti, member of parliament and councilor of state at 

 Borne, eminent student of constitutional law, which he came to dis- 

 cuss before the congress under the department of jurisprudence, after 

 a few preliminary words in English, broke into his own familiar tongue 

 in order, as he explained, to do justice to the feelings by which he 

 was moved. The demonstrative enthusiasm of his expression was re- 

 ciprocated by the hearty applause of the audience. In this succession 

 of striking addresses by eminent personages, so individual and at the 

 same time so representative, the keynote of the congress was struck and 

 the spirit which animated the whole was quickly caught. 



The scientific part of the program Avas then set going by the intro- 

 ductory address of the president of the congress, Erofessor Newcomb, 

 who sketched in a scholarly and illuminating manner the evolution of 

 the scientific investigator, who must be regarded as ' the primary agent 

 in the movement which has elevated man to the masterful position he 

 now occupies." The common motives of all research and the vital sig- 

 nificance of all truth for civilization and human welfare, as brought 

 out in this address, seemed at once to suggest and to justify the uni- 

 versal scope and synthetic purpose of the congress, which was to com- 

 prehend not only all the branches of theoretic knowledge, but their 

 several applications to the arts of life. 



On Tuesday morning the seven grand divisions of the congress con- 

 vened simultaneously, each division being addressed by an American 

 scholar, chosen because of a conspicuous breadth of grasp in a wide 

 domain of inquiry and an authoritative appreciation of its inner unity. 



Thus normative science, inclusive of philosophy and mathematics 

 in their entirety, was discussed by Erofessor Josiah Eoyce of Harvard 

 University, America's foremost representative of speculative philosophy, 

 unrivaled in systematic and constructive learning, unexceled in subtlety 



