PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 103 



lays stress upon the fact that the most advanced sciences have 

 attained to their present power by a slow process of improve- 

 ment, extending through thousands of years, that science and 

 the positive knowledge of the uncultured cannot be separated 

 in nature, and that the one is but a perfected and extended form 

 of the other. "Is not science a growth?" says he, "Has not 

 science its embryology? And must not the neglect of its embry- 

 ology lead to a misunderstanding of the principles of its evolution 

 and its existing organization?" 



It seems to me unfortunate, therefore, that we should allow the 

 value of the labors of our pi - edecessors to be depreciated, or to 

 refer to the naturalists of the last century as belonging to the un- 

 scientific or to the archaic period. It has been frequently said bv 

 naturalists that there was no science in America until after the 

 beginning of the present century. This is, in one sense, true, in 

 another, very false. There were then, it is certain, many men 

 equal in capacity, in culture, in enthusiasm, to the naturalists of 

 to-day, who were giving careful attention to the study of precisely 

 the same phenomena of nature. The misfortune of men of science 

 in the year of 1785 was that they had three generations fewer of 

 scientific predecessors than have we. Can it be doubted that the 

 scientists of some period long distant will look back upon the 

 work of our own time as archaic and crude, and catalogue our 

 books among the " curiosities of scientific literature?" 



Is it not incumbent upon workers in science to keep green the 

 memory of those whose traditions they have inherited ? That it 

 is, I do most steadfastly believe, and with this purpose I have 

 taken advantage of the tercentenary of American biology to 

 read this review of the work of the men of old. 



Monuments are not often erected to men of science. More 

 enduring, however, than monuments are those living and self- 

 perpetuating memorials, the plants and animals which bear the 

 names of the masters who knew them and loved them. Well have 

 the Agassizs remarked that " there is a world of meaning hid- 



