STATE POIvIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 15 



that were growing upon the great pasture lands of the region 

 through which his railroads went; he interested farmers in im- 

 proving their methods, and increasing itheir yield ; he did every- 

 thing needed to bring pro'sperity to others, realizing that in that 

 prosperity his interesits would have a proper share. 



It seems to me that if this principle that the progress of any 

 of u's is intimately hound uip in the progress of all of us can get 

 into the thinking and the acting of our people, many of the 

 problems that have troubled us in the pastt will become remark- 

 ably easy of solution in the future. We see many evidences 

 that fhis is coming to be true. It is not an uncommon thing 

 today to find business men uniting to give credit and strength 

 to a rival wdio may be .hard pushed by some business trouble. I 

 can well remember the time, as many of you can, when if a 

 business man was in trouble, all his rivals helped him over the 

 divide, and ,gave him a push down the other side. But we are 

 seeing better than that today, and we are realizing that the 

 failure of this enterprise or that or the other, in some way 

 comes back and reacts and reflects upon the enterprise in 

 which we are engaged. We need to see that this principle ajp- 

 plies in all parts and activities of our lives. Sometimes the re- 

 lation is very remote. Sometimes we grow impatient with the 

 man w^ho is w'orking upon this line or that or the other, 

 that to us seems unimportant. We fail sometimes to realize 

 that the scholar working in hi's laboratory, upon some problem 

 that seems to us remote from any activity upon wbich we are 

 engaged, is not merely a dead expense to the community. 



I suppose over in Germany a generation or more ago there 

 were a great many people who looked upon Hertz, the great 

 German scientist, as a man who was being supported in idleness 

 and worthlessness when he was devoting his days and his 

 weeks and his months and his years to the study of waves. 

 There are people, no doubt, who looked upon him as almost 

 out of his head when they saw him out there by the side of 

 the lake, studying the action of waves, under different influ- 

 ences, seeing how these waves interfered with each other, and 

 how under certain conditions they destroyed each other, while 

 under other conditions they tended to increase and multiply 

 each other. Then when he extended his study to the action of 



