AMERICA'S INTELLECTUAL PRODUCT 201 



dread the influence of German} 7 . Although I can not sympathize with 

 them, I am far from maintaining that our liberation from bondage to 

 medievalism began when students began to go to Germany. I do not 

 forget Franklin, whose scientific researches made him a great figure in 

 the great world when it was hardly known what an American was, but 

 I must point out distinctly that Franklin was not only the product of 

 no university, but that he was never a professor in one, so that he 

 constitutes no exception to the condition that I have described. I re- 

 member also with pride the discoveries of Joseph Henry, the first 

 secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, whose great discoveries in 

 electricity entitle him to be named with Faraday, and had there been 

 here any appreciation of scientific research or had the means of com- 

 munication with Europe been greater, and especially had not Faraday 

 made most of the same discoveries in England, Henry would have made 

 his name one for all Americans to cherish as a national glory. It is 

 with feelings of peculiar pleasure that I notice, each spring on my visit 

 to Washington, the statue of Henry in front of the Smithsonian, a 

 welcome change from the bronze man on horseback with cocked hat 

 and sword with which the capital swarms, and a quiet proof that even 

 republics are not totally ungrateful, and that they recognize that there 

 are other kinds of glory than military glory. 



It would be impossible to pass over in silence the great influence 

 of Louis Agassiz, coming to Cambridge over fifty years ago, who by his 

 wonderful personality not only encouraged many to take up research 

 as a profession, but also kindled the imagination of the public, and led 

 it to see that science was deserving of respect, and not of the suspicion 

 that it had often encountered on religious grounds. Such was the 

 success of Agassiz that we still hear stories of him that would seem to 

 mark him as the first to succeed in opening the purses of the rich 

 for scientific research. Agassiz did more for science than is possible to 

 many; he left a son who not only rose to the highest level among 

 American scientists in the same line as his father, but, more practical 

 in his applications of science, and equally actuated by the desire to ad- 

 vance science itself, was able to exercise a generosity that, until the time 

 of the present millionaire gifts, made him the largest single contribu- 

 tor to Harvard. 



It is frequently supposed that the American public is extremely in- 

 terested in the results of scientific progress, and so it is, in a certain 

 sense. Certainly we can not accuse it of lack of alertness, when it reads 

 more than any other — in the newspapers. It reads with eager interest, 

 and with implicit credulity accounts of the supposed discoveries of 

 science, taking at equal value the productions of notorious charlatans 

 and those of real investigators. It reads with wonder of the discovery 

 of radium, laying particular weight on its costing millions of dollars 



