ELISHA MITCHELL SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY. 25 



ever you may choose to call it. It means an un^'ield- 

 ing- determination to persevere in spite of difficulties 

 and discourag"ements. Accuracy of observation, clear- 

 ness of intellect are all g'ood and necessary, but unless 

 you have g*enuine .i^rrit, and stick at the task you have 

 set yourself, you can make no very valuable conquest 

 from nature nor contribution to the store of human 

 knowledg-e. It is the patient settler who has cleared 

 the land, tilled the soil, sown the seed, toiled, suffered 

 and waited and thus has won for the world its ^reat 

 feeding--g-round in our Western States, and so it is the 

 patient Darwin, the toiling- Ag-assiz, the untiring- Liebig-, 

 who have opened to us such g-reat vistas in the domain 

 of science. If we would follow them we must toil over 

 the stepping- stones they have succeeded in laying-. If 

 we would gT) yet further and discover Nature's secret^ 

 for ourselves, a capacity for patient drudg-ery must be 

 ours. And yet, thoug-h it seem drudg-er}' to others who 

 are merely looking- on, it is not really such, for to us 

 it must be a labor of love. 



I wish to bring- before you some eminent examples 

 of drudg-es that you may draw^ encourag-ement from 

 them. Many instances mig-ht be drawn, first, from the 

 life of Darwin. Take, for example, his patience when 

 he reports himself as watching- for two hours to see 

 whether a spider put the rig-ht foot or the left foot in 

 front in weaving-, and his honesty in confessing-, at the 

 end of it, that he could not tell. Consider those fifty 

 years during- which he watched the lowly earth worm 

 and found out for us its beneficent action in preparing' 

 our soils. 



Patient drudg-es, or shall we call them heroes, are to 

 be found in all the branches of science. Think of Lub- 

 bock and his work with ants and bees; of Khrenberg- 



