236 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ILLINOIS 



incubators, go about our other business, and allow poets and philosophers 

 to be born in the good old-fashioned way, and continue to elect our 

 presidents by vote instead of hatching them out by science. (Laughter 

 and clapping of hands.) 



Since, then, the three scientific questions which have for a quarter of 

 a century more deeply agitated Christendom than all othMB put together 

 are now, by the very highest authority on either continent, relegated to the 

 limbo of imaginative scientific dogmatism, we may possess our souls in 

 peace, and in spite of ecclesiastic or philosophic pope or priest may 

 rationally believe that we still exist ; that we are not merely so many 

 hundred pounds of salt pork and corn dodgers, scientifically digested and 

 combined; that the Infinite Father of all will take the best possible care of 

 each one of us, and that in all worlds alike we shall continue to have 

 some very comfortable sort of weather, whether we come to understand 

 all its laws and causes or not. 



At all events we have reached some few facts in Meteorology that 

 are likely to stand forever ; which is more than can be said of many of 

 our merely Dogmatic Sciences, or of any of our merely Dogmatic 

 Theologies. (Applause.) 



The Professor concluded with a few remarks substantially as follows : 

 We are well aware that there are frequent great gatherings and 

 marshalings of storms ; and from what we know of the order of nature, 

 the relations of antecedents and resultant phenomena, we know that 

 these gatherings and all their consequent effects must be produced by 

 causes or antecedents as powerful, as extended and as continuous as are 

 the storms themselves ; for no effect can be greater than its cause. Hence 

 the electric theory promulgated by Professor Tice, which attributes all 

 these phenomena to that all-pervading and tremendously powerful form 

 of force which we call electricity, seems nearly or quite sufficient to 

 account for the birth, the movements and the force of storms. But there 

 are many and complex problems in meteorology which are not yet solved, 

 and especially have we or any living being neither learned to predict 

 positively just when and where and with how great or little force a storm 

 will come and affect any State, county or town, nor how to produce, turn 

 aside or prevent a storm. 



Yet the time will come when Man can harness the wind and drive 

 the storm. Many years may come and go before this great consumma- 

 tion is reached ; yet I believe the intellect of Man is or will, by its 

 increasing development and with the increasing discovery of Nature's 

 laws, become sufficient to so direct the forces which control and produce 

 ordinary local phenomena as to make them subservient to his Will. 

 (Applause.) 



