BiocHEMiCAL Bulletin 



Volume V FEBRUARY-MARCH, 1916 No. 18-19 



SCIENTIFIC TRUTH AND THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT^ 



A. B. MACALLUM, F.R.S. 



In appearing before you this evening in my present röle I can- 

 not but recall an incident of fifty-five years ago, which often recurs 

 to my mind when I think of the events of today. 



The Trustees of the Smithsonian Institution in 1861 were pre- 

 paring their programme for the year, and in this programme were 

 courses of lectures to be given to the pubhc on a series of selected 

 topics. Their intention was announced and they were importuned 

 to devote those lectures lo what was at that time in everybody's 

 mind. It was the first year of your great war of the Secession. I 

 say your war, but I might with some justification have called it our 

 war, for there fought in the ranks of the armies of the North 

 68,coo British Citizens of whom 45,000 were Canadians, and of 

 the latter 15,000 lost their lives. There were even then stop-the- 

 war people, prototypes of the Fords, the Akeds, the Jane Addamses 

 and the Lloyd Joneses of today, futile, mole-visioned and cloister- 

 minded, who imagined that the great conflict could be prevented by 

 talking and they wished to avail themselves of the opportunity the 

 lectures might present of showing how it could be done. 



The Trustees apparently wished to be neutral, perhaps they 

 were uncertain what the upshot of the conflict was going to be, and 

 this may have helped them to decide, as they did, that all War topics 

 should be excluded from their programme. To secure that they 

 invited Professor, afterwards Sir, Daniel Wilson of the University 

 of Toronto, to give a course of lectures on Prehistoric Man. Pro- 



1 Address delivered at the Fifth Annual Dinner of the Columbia University 

 Biochemical Association, February loth, 1916. See page 123. 



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