The Period from 1861 to 1870 ij 



proaching the meridian of life. Before the omniscient Judge, they will surely be credited 

 to each individual in the great account. But if we consider not the individuals but the 

 people, and hold the community responsible for its collective failures, while we give 

 it credit for its collective achievements, in the intellectual field, I am sometimes appre- 

 hensive that we are given to pluming ourselves too much, and to estimating our progress 

 rather by the number of obstacles which we know to have been surmounted, than by 

 the mile-stones which have been left behind. Communities have merits and failings, 

 as individuals have ; they are but the integral of their many constituent individuals ; 

 and among our national failings can scarcely be counted that of judging ourselves too 

 harshly. Our aim should not be to overcome difficulties, except so far as this is a 

 necessary means of advance ; it is progress, toward which our efforts should be directed, 

 and if the obstacles are serious, we have, as a people, no right to credit merely for 

 having surmounted them, provided we possess, and do not employ, the power to remove 

 them. Can the intellectual standing and rank of a nation be fairly measured by the 

 highest achievements of its ablest and most devoted men, if so be that these men or 

 their deeds are not the legitimate fruit of the tendencies and influences at work, but, on 

 the contrary, are exceptional cases, which have maintained their existence and even 

 blossomed out by virtue of the humanity that was in them, notwithstanding hindrances 

 and discouragements? . . . 



"Two hundred and forty years," I hear some one say, "what are they in the de- 

 velopment of a nation, or of its scientific character? Twenty-five centuries have passed 

 since Thales predicted an eclipse of the sun ; nineteen, since Sosigenes reformed the 

 calendar for Julius Caesar ; fourteen hundred years have rolled over the University of 

 Bologna. What to you occidentals seems a hoary antiquity, is a mere yesterday for 

 the dweller by the Tiber, the Thames, the Seine, the Danube or the Rhine." Be it so ! 

 Yet Hans Lippersheim's first suggestion of a telescope was eighteen months after New- 

 port had sailed up the James River with his infant colony. The idea of a logarithm 

 was then not born : Napier and Briggs were names unknown to fame. The oaks and 

 beeches had been cleared from these hills, and our ancestors had built their rustic 

 homes, at the time when Galileo was tortured into adjuring the profane doctrine that 

 the earth moved, and not the sun. When Harvard endowed the college that bears his 

 name, there was no such thing as a barometer or a thermometer. It is within these 

 very two hundred and forty years that modern science has come into existence, and 

 the world's intellect been turned from speculation to investigation. It is within this 

 period that our implements of research have been devised, that the air-pump, the elec- 

 trical machine and the clock have been invented, that every public chemical laboratory, 

 every astronomical or physical observatory, and every academy of sciences has been 

 founded. Boston had been settled when Keppler died. The grandchildren of the origi- 

 nal colonists of Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay were born, when the law of 

 universal gravitation was first proclaimed by Newton. 



Therefore it is that we must confess our scientific progress to have been far inferior 

 to that of several European nations. And I fear that the confession might truthfully 

 be made much broader, and include our progress in all purely intellectual studies, which 

 hold forth no promise of immediate utility in promoting physical well-being or material 

 convenience. If this is true, my friends, it is time that it should be so no longer. And 

 before you, the declared lovers of science, — in this Association formed to promote her 

 welfare and advancement, — here in the earliest seat of that colony, whence has geo- 

 graphically radiated what of culture and of science our country has possessed, — I would 

 fain say some few words which, however crude or ill-arranged, might find a congenial 

 soil within your hearts — to bear fruit, perhaps, when all of us have disappeared from 

 the stage — and which might aid, in however small a degree, to avert the day when the 



