30 KANSAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 



the American revolution, and the French revolution of 1793. No 

 more tradition, no more Aristotle, no more hair-splitting casuistry of 

 the churchman. The imperial power of science and the laboratory 

 was henceforth to change this old world. The sovereign century had 

 come, and man the sovereign had also come. The horizon of human 

 life, thought and activity has been widely extended since the world 

 discovered a hundred years ago that "the great forces of nature are 

 neither sacred nor profane, neither kind or cruel ; that they neither 

 love nor hate, and that they are more unchangeable than the stars ; 

 that shrines and temples, priests and priestesses, tripods and oracles, 

 have been in vain, except so far as they reached the human heart and 

 satisfied its natural craving for the worship of the Supreme Being. 

 Instead of building a temple to the far-darting Apollo, or to Zeus, the 

 thunderer, we now stretch over our cities a network for artificial 

 lighting ; and all the winds that blow and all the waters that flow are 

 made to furnish their tribute to our comfort and pleasure. We tap 

 the sources of endless energy and transmit it through all the ramifica- 

 tions of our social order, relieving mankind from heavy burdens and 

 creating hundreds of occupations hitherto unknown." A change of 

 front has taken place all along the line. This does not mean that the 

 past is to be buried in oblivion by any means. All that has come to 

 us out of the past that is permanently fine and essential to high think- 

 ing and well doing, the epics of Homer, the philosophy of Plato, the 

 splendid drama of Job and the Psalms of David must continually 

 "live, imperishable monuments of the youth of the world." 



Let Aristotle go : let the hair-splitting casuistry of the schoolmen 

 be forgotten ; let the hide-bound dogmas of the old theologians be 

 cast to the moles and the bats ; our modern life stands for the best, 

 and our intellectual activities give promise of still nobler things. 

 "The defenders of the Johnsonian programs delight in the use of un- 

 worthy epithets with which to characterize the tendency of modern 

 education ; they plead for humanities as though anything human was 

 foreign to our curriculum." What can be more human than human 

 life as we see it and as we share it ? What problems can be more 

 human than those which face nine out of ten of the people who reach 

 the age of individual responsibility '? 



Francis A. Walker, late president of the Massachusetts Institute of 

 Technology, in his remarks at the dedication of the new science and 

 engineering buildings at McGill University, Montreal, said : 



"The notion that scientific work was something essentially less 

 fine and high and noble than the pursuit of rhetoric and philosophy, 

 Latin and Greek, was deeply seated in the minds of the leading edu- 

 cators of America a generation ago. We can hardly hope to see that 



