Address by Professor Baldwin. xxxv 



To this may be attributed in part the failure to complete the 

 Statistical Account of the towns of Connecticut. Comparatively 

 few, outside of New Haven, would interest themselves actively in 

 a work directed and controlled by a handful of New Haven men. 



On the other hand, the Academy has been a source for the dif- 

 fusion of knowledge throughout all our States, and, we may say, 

 throughout all the world. It has been, more than anything else, 

 the perpetual springhead of the American Journal of Science, and 

 its Memoirs and Transactions have preserved statistics, recorded 

 observations and developed theories, that have been of service 

 wherever science is cultivated and arts pursued. 



It has not fulfilled all of its founders 1 hopes. But it may have 

 done better. If it has narrowed its field in one direction, it has 

 widened it in another. 



It does not end the century as it began it. If it did, it would 

 be unworthy of its name. It has changed with the times. New 

 modes of action, new premises of reasoning, new rules of science, 

 have become the property of the world. To these the Academy 

 has sought to conform, and as it stands before the door of the 

 Twentieth Century, and awaits its opening, it may claim to enter 

 as one of the rightful heirs of possessions and possibilities to which 

 it has itself made no unimportant contributions. 



Child of the eighteenth century, trained at the school of the 

 nineteenth, the Academy now steps forward to a third age, still 

 in the spirit that belongs to perpetual youth. That can be 

 claimed by the corporation formed for the promotion of knowl- 

 edge, alone of all human things. Perpetuity conies to it as the 

 gift of the State : youth as its birthright ; for human knowledge 

 is yet in its infancy, and what we have already accumulated will 

 be seen by each future generation in a different light, bringing to 

 them a new meaning, and asking from them new conclusions. 



The business corporation, the ecclesiastical corporation, the cor- 

 poration to support this or that particular school of professional 

 practice, may find, as centuries go by, not only its methods but its 

 objects antiquated and outworn. It is the corporation formed to 

 promote all knowledge, to seek truth wherever it may be found, 

 to expose error wherever it may be detected, that endures. 



