Celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary. li 



their folly to each other a little more easily. Far different 

 is the truth for which these works stand. They represent 

 in concrete form the great triumphs of the human imagina- 

 tion. Man, the artifex — the originator — has been with us 

 ever since Prometheus brought down the fire from heaven, 

 but in no age have the heavenly mysteries been more fully or 

 more freely revealed than they have been in ours. When the 

 English language had come to youthful maturity in the days 

 of Elizabeth, the great dramatists and other great writers 

 used it for the purpose of expressing human thought as it 

 was never used before or since, and to-day in the world about 

 us the masters of engineering skill are using the knowledge 

 accumulated by science in the same easy, powerful, and mas- 

 terful way, to express the imaginations of their own inner 

 souls. Man has entered into the world as a creative power 

 as he never has done in days past. In these creative works 

 he feels something of the joy of the creator. You remember 

 the words of Kipling in McAndrew's hymn : 



" O' that warkl-lifliu' joy no after-fall could vex, 

 Ye've left a ylimraer slill to cheer the Mun, the Artifex I" 



It is the longing for this eternal joy, the desire for the sense 

 of mastery over the great forces of nature, which applied 

 science has fulfilled for man to-day in a measure unknown to 

 any earlier generation. 



Consider such a structure as your Eads bridge, built by one 

 of the founders of your Academy, the first great bridge which 

 spanned the Mississippi River. It is a wonderful production 

 of human skill, of the hitman hand, but a far more wonderful 

 production of the human mind, for in the mind of the engi- 

 neer the bridge stood complete before it was built. Every 

 beam, every chord, every rivet of the bridge was present to 

 his thought in an '* interdependence absolute, foreseen, or- 

 dained, decreed;" each in its place and each exactly propor- 

 tioned to its strain. In a thousand other works the same 

 creative force is seen and these works — these supreme 

 achievements of the human mind — can look up to man as 

 their creator and give to him that highest praise — " Thine 



