42 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN SCENIC 

 AND HISTORIC PRESERVATION SOCIETY. 



George F. Kunz, Ph. D. 



Linnasus was a great scientist, and the conquests of science have done 

 more to advance the world than wars, which science may yet render im- 

 possible. It was thirty years of scientific research in Germany that gave 

 us artificial indigo. It was pure scientific research that led Moissan, Cowles 

 and Acheson to discover independently an abrasive substance of a hardness 

 between the diamond and the sapphire; and then Moissan by scientific 

 deduction worked out the genesis of the hardest and most fearless of gems, 

 which, though obtained only in the form of powder, was still the diamond. 

 Within the past quarter of a century we have seen air, oxygen and hydrogen 

 liquefied, giving us temperatures absolutely unknown in nature before, and 

 also the electric furnace, giving an extreme heat such as has perhaps never 

 existed, unless it be on the surface of the sun. 



Jade, the Chinese stone, has been known in China for more than a 

 thousand years. Some believe that it was known to a prehistoric race the 

 existence of which was almost unknown to the Chinese, and whose only 

 records extant are found as we find the evidences left of the mound-builders, 

 who passed away before the advent of the white man in North America. It 

 was not until 1866 that Damour, a scientist, separated jade into two distinct 

 minerals, nephrite and jadeite; and one of those into two varieties, jadeite 

 and chloromelanite — facts unknown to the Chinese, though they apparently 

 knew and understood every tiny fragment they had ever seen of this mineral. 

 It was the scientist who took three red stones belonging to the King of 

 Burmah or to the Emperor of China, and proved to him that one was a 

 ruby, one was a spinel, and the third a tourmaline, and not all rubies, as 

 they had been regarded for a century or more previously. 



Moses was the first great systematizer, and his original assemblage of 

 the people in tens, hundreds and thousands, is carried out in the military 

 systems of to-day, and is again reflected in our own and in the monetary 

 systems of many of the European nations, and more especially in that indis- 

 pensable and scientific international system of weights and measures, the 

 metric system. It was Alexander who conquered the eastern world, bring- 

 ing back with him much refinement, and possibly also the valuable and 

 industrious silkworm ; and it was he also who discovered that the carrying 

 powers of his camels were doubled if he employed a gold medium of exchange 

 instead of silver. Csesar, in his attempt to conquer the world, did much 



