PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES. 33 



"The middle ages covered Europe with cathedrals of unsurpassed 

 beauty and grandeur, but made no new discoveries to lighten the toil 

 or increase the comfort of the race." Only about ten i^ractical dis- 

 coveries and inventions of the first magnitude were made from the 

 dawn of history to the beginning of the nineteenth century. These 

 were alphabetical writing, Arabic numerals, printing, the barometer 

 and thermometer, the mariner's compass, the telescope, the steam-en- 

 gine, which belongs more properly to the nineteenth century, gun- 

 powder, the screw, and the wheel. To the nineteenth century eighteen 

 such inventions and discoveries belong — railways, steamships, elec- 

 tric telegraphs, the telephone, Lucifer matches, gas illumination, elec- 

 tric lighting, photography, the phonograph, the Roentgen rays, 

 spectrum analysis, anesthetics, antiseptic surgery, vaccination, the 

 cotton-gin, the typewriter, the sewing-machine, and the self-binding 

 reaper. To these may be added Pasteur's solution of the process of 

 fermentation, the various methods employed in the liquefaction of 

 gases by intense cold, the organization of great hospitals, public and 

 private, conducted upon the most highly approved scientific and 

 sanitary principles, great schools for the scientific study of poverty 

 and crime, discoveries along geograjjliic and geologic lines, and the 

 complete transformation from the old methods to the modern labora- 

 tory method. Such is a part of the inheritance bequeathed to the 

 twentieth century by the demise of the nineteenth. The laboratory 

 is the great revealer. Out of it comes the truth. Under its relentless 

 power error and superstition are crushed. History, literature, meta- 

 physics, and art, poetry and theology, even science itself, must sub- 

 mit to the keen scalpel of the laboratory. According to one writer, 

 the "philologist must have the aid of the physiologist to unravel the 

 problem of human speech ; the philosopher, also, in order to explain 

 the workings of the human brain." "With pick and shovel the 

 archaeologist has brought to light the ancient civilization of Egypt, 

 and the implements of primitive man." "He has dug out the Ilium 

 of Priam, and laid bare the Roman forum, and read from the clay 

 tablets the language of the Assyrians." By him the history and life 

 of the mound-builders and cliff-dwellers of North America are com- 

 ing to the light. 



In literature, also, the century stands unrivaled. With perhaps 

 the single exception of poetry, there is nothing in the past that can 

 approach in beauty, purity, diction and style the prose, the philoso- 

 phy, the romance and the history of the writers of the nineteenth 

 century. Such singular preeminence is not to be found in any of the 

 writings of previous centuries. What has caused such a marvelous 

 —3 



