PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 



The Academy of Sciences. 



Twenty-three centuries ago, when the first and fairest flowers 

 of civihzation were in blossom, Plato and his friends met together 

 in an Athenian garden to talk of the things that appeared to 

 them to be beautiful, good and true. The garden was called 

 " The Academy," and the word has ever since maintained the 

 high traditions of its origin, uniting the ideas of friendly social 

 intercourse and the search for truth. The philosophy of Plato 

 was passed on to his disciples, so that we read of fourth and 

 fifth academies ; it was transplanted to Rome, where Cicero 

 named his country house "The Academy," and to Alexandria, 

 where mystical neo-platonism long resisted the dogmatic rational- 

 ism of the church. 



As part of the Italian renaissance, when civilization was once 

 more young, vigorous and beautiful, as in the Greek period, the 

 word " academy" was revived and used to name a society of 

 scholars. Cosimo dei Medici, the Elder, established at Florence 

 in the fifteenth century a Platonic Academy, and academies of 

 letters by the hundred flourished in Italy during the sixteenth 

 century. In 1560 there was established at Naples by the ver- 

 satile Giambattista della Porta the first academy of sciences — 

 Acadeniia Secretorum Naturce — to which only those were ad- 

 mitted who had contributed to the advancement of science or 

 medicine. The academy at Naples was suppressed on the ac- 

 cusation that it practised the black arts ; but soon afterwards 

 there was established at Rome, with Galileo as one of its mem- 

 bers, the Accadcmia dei Lined, which was later revived and is 

 now one of the great national academies. 



The mere word " academy " is of course unimportant ; societies 

 of scholars are not always called academies, nor are all academies 

 societies of scholars. The beginnings of associations for the ad- 

 vancement of knowledge are to be found in sav^age tribes, de- 



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