REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT, 1917. 9 



a-day world and plaj^ed his part with uncommon vigor and 

 discernment, but ahvaj^s also with a disposition of uncommon 

 fairness, justice, and mercy. It was this disposition that made 

 him a sympathetic and valued adviser of the Institution during 

 the later years of his life, even after retiring from his trusteeship 

 at the end of 1906. 



During a period when one half of the world is at war with the 



other half, when governments long established are imperiled by 



the impulses of primitive men, leading in the 



star Catalogue extremes either to the excesses of autocracy or 



of Ulugh Beg. 



to the excesses of ana.rchy, there would seem to 

 be little room for the consideration of the current events of a 

 research establishment. Attention must be concentrated on the 

 needs of states, whose stability and continuity are prerequisite 

 to the existence of organizations devoted to abstract investiga- 

 tion. There appears to be scant opportunity for contemplative 

 studies; time seems available only for the utihzation of existing 

 knowledge; the daily events of international conflict quite over- 

 shadow all others in immediate interest. But while public 

 attention is properly engrossed in the exigencies of national and 

 international affairs, it is well to recall that periods like the 

 present have not been less fruitful in discoveries and advances of 

 permanent value to our race than the periods of more peaceful 

 activities. The course of human evolution has not run sm.oothly, 

 and it does not appear to be destined to become frictionless in the 

 near future. Neither has the general trend upward of mankind 

 been unaccompanied by depressing reversions to the instincts 

 of barbarism. But these sinister facts, so painfully verified in 

 contemporaiy history, are mitigated by other facts which show 

 that the essentials of progress will be the last to disappear in any 

 possible reversion and that they may even survive and flourish 

 amid the ruins of empires. Thus, while the ideas of Alexander 

 and Caesar and the long line of Greek and Roman statesmen, 

 philosophers, and poets are still properly held to be highly worthy 

 of critical studj^, it is plain that they are of a far less permanent 

 character than the ideas, for example, of the Alexandrian school 

 of scientists, whose contributions to knowledge relate to prin- 

 ciples coextensive with the universe at large as well as with 

 that small part of it wherein we happen temporarily to reside. 



