IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 27 



physicist, the ethnologist, the mechanic, must assist. What a 

 pathetic spectacle is presented in the charitable and mission 

 work man is doing for his fellow man. It is the old story of 

 eradicating one evil and sowing the seeds of a dczen more. 

 How little of philanthropic work aims at more than alleviating 

 present conditions! Were it not for the fact that in some 

 instances, and they are all too few, the highest of scientific attain- 

 ments are being directed Toward studying and correlating the 

 fundamental laws of society for the purpose of establishing abid- 

 ing criteria of action I should deem the field of social reform 

 utterly hopeless. We evidently need not so much a change of 

 method here as a change from no method at all to a scientific 

 method. 



The scientific world stands committed to the theory of 

 evolution, for by no other can the existing order of things be 

 explaiuec], even though much is as yet unexplained. It is the 

 only thing that can bind our scientific knowledge into a coher- 

 ing whole. Any ignoriug of it plunges into deepest empiri- 

 cism. The ideas of growth, development, change from simple 

 to complex, and resulting inter-relationships are extremely 

 vague in popular thought. Particular modes of procedure are 

 often mistaken for general principlfs, this or that theory for a 

 law. One of the greatest obstacles that the theory of evolution, 

 the only real interpreter of facts, has had to contend with has 

 been and is now the widespread belief in infallibility — infallibility 

 of all knowledge. Yet no more important truth needs to be 

 learned than that the v\fisdom of to-day may become the folly of 

 to-morrow. A change in belief is too often mistaken for an 

 exchange of an old for a new dogma. The fact that scientific 

 theories and knowledge in the year 1^98 are not like those in 

 the year 1859 constrains many, pariicularly those of a theolog- 

 ical bias, to deny any truth in either. Nor do many scientists 

 place themselves in any more commendable attitude. Some of 

 our scientists give evidence of as intoleraiit a dogmatism as 

 ever disgraced ecclesiastical history. The man who assumes 

 infallibility of scientific knowledge, in whole or in part, thereby 

 puts himself beyond the p^le of truth seekicg. 



President Coulter notices among botanists of to-day several 

 bad tendencies. Some of them have so wide an application 

 that I may use them in recapitulating my preceding statements: 

 1. The tendency to narrowness. This is shown in the magnifica- 

 tion of details, and minimizing of relationships; in the failure 



