AN ASPECT OF THE 

 PROMOTION OF SCIENCE 



Mr. President, Ladies, and Gentlemen, 



I wish to assure you, first of all, that the Royal Netherlands Academy 

 of Sciences feels greatly honored by the invitation addressed to its Pres- 

 ident to attend the Annual Meeting of the National Academy of Sci- 

 ences. The Netherlands Academy is proud that, when you decided to 

 make it a tradition to have a foreign academy represented at your 

 meeting - a tradition so admirably inaugurated last year by the Pres- 

 ident of The Royal Society - your thoughts went out to the Nether- 

 lands. 



It seems probable that historical considerations were responsible for 

 this. For I need not recall that my countrymen were among the first 

 settlers in this continent, and some of these have either directly, or 

 indirectly by their offspring, left their mark on American history. In 

 a recent speech, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands cited as an exam- 

 ple Klaes Martensen van Roosevelt, a simple farmer of Holland's re- 

 cently flooded province of Zeeland who arrived in the New World 

 around 1650. Although little is known about this early settler, he be- 

 came the common ancestor of seven presidents of the United States : 

 James Madison, Martin van Buren, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, 

 William H. Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

 Altogether there is little doubt that there are nowadays millions of 

 Americans who are at least partly of Dutch descent. 



Now that I have used the word 'Dutch', for the first time, I cannot 

 refrain from making a short digression. Only about two months ago, 

 the New York Times thought it fit to devote one of its topics to the use 

 of the word 'Dutch' in the English vocabulary. The article opened 

 with the statement, 'the adjective "Dutch" generally has an opprobri- 

 ous or uncomplimentary connotation', although, in its usual attempt 

 at fairness, the Times did not omit to observe that, in a few combinati- 

 ons like 'Dutch door', the adjective only denotes the origin of the proto- 



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