ADDRESSES OF ELIOT AND MARSH. 473 



only obtain such glimpses of the progressive order of plant-chemistry, 

 and we have only such a distant view of chemical action itself, as can 

 give us some hints of the order, harmony, and grandeur, of the molec- 

 ular changes going on in ripening fruits before us. None the less 

 for our ignorance, the forces each season complete their work and 

 drop their bountiful products into our hands. 



-*- 



ADDRESSES OF ELIOT AND MARSH, 



AT THE OPENING OF THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY. 



Address of President C. W. Eliot. 



IN whose honor are the chief personages of the nation, State, and 

 city, here assembled ? Whose palace is this ? What divinity is wor- 

 shiped in this place ? We are assembled here to own with gratitude 

 the beneficent power of natural science ; to praise and thank its vota- 

 ries, and to dedicate this splendid structure to its service. The power 

 to which we here do homage is the accumulated intelligence of our 

 race applied generation after generation to the study of Nature ; and 

 this palace is the storehouse of the elaborated materials which that 

 intelligence has garnered, ordered, and illuminated. What has natu- 

 ral science done for mankind that it should be thus honored? In the 

 brief moments allotted to me I can but mention three pregnant results 

 of the scientific study of Nature. 



In the first place, natural science has engendered a peculiar kind of 

 human mind the searching, open, humble mind, which, knowing that 

 it cannot attain unto all truth, or even to much new truth, is yet pa- 

 tiently and enthusiastically devoted to the pursuit of such little new 

 truth as is within its grasp, having no other end than to learn, prizing 

 above all things accuracy, thoroughness, and candor, in research, proud 

 and happy not in its own single strength, but in the might of that 

 host of students, whose past conquests make up the wondrous sum of 

 present knowledge, whose sure future triumphs each humblest worker 

 in imagination shares. Within the last four hundred years this typi- 

 cal scientific mind has gradually come to be the kind of philosophic 

 mind most admired by the educated class ; indeed, it has come to be 

 the only kind of mind, except the poetic, which commands the respect, 

 of scholars, whatever their department of learning. In every field of 

 study, in history, philology, philosophy, and theology, as well as in 

 natural history and physics, it is now the scientific spirit, the scien- 

 tific method, which prevails. The substitution in the esteem of rea- 

 sonable men of this receptive, fore-reaching mind for the dogmatic, 

 overbearing, closed mind, which assumes that it already possesses all 

 essential truth, and is entitled to the exclusive interpretation of it, is 



