Semi-Centennial Volume. 55 



chine, two Leyden jars, a gas bag and six test tubes. There was but one 

 scientific society then in the United States, and but one or two scientific 

 periodicals; now there are so many that few pretend to know their names 

 even. 



Perhaps these few words will convey some conception of the state of 

 science in the United States, and especially in Kansas, when this Academy 

 was born. Do you not then reverence the courage or idealism of those 

 few devoted founders of this Academy which they dedicated to the ad- 

 vancement of science in this, a frontier state? 



To recount, even in the most general way, the progress of the sciences 

 in these fifty years is almost beyond the limits of my time and oppor- 

 tunity, to say nothing of my ability. And the subject loomed so large to 

 me that I would have lost courage to undertake it had I not felt conscious 

 of the support my colleagues would give me. They told me, almost all 

 whom I consulted, that the history of each science for the past fifty years 

 comprised its larger part. Told me some of them almost in the words 

 that I had used nearly fifty years before of the progress of science in the 

 preceding fifty years. Will the same be said fifty years hence? I doubt 

 it not. 



I may say with assurance that, in nearly every branch of science, 

 progress in these years has been from the descriptive to the analytical, 

 from the search after facts to the search after reasons, for causes; 

 from the is to the ivhy. Facts are still accumulating, accumulating as 

 never before, but it has been their interpretation and application that 

 has been the basis for the greatly accelerated progress of this last 

 half century. And I think that I can say without fear of contradiction 

 that, underlying all else, were the two great discoveries of the pre- 

 ceding fifty years — conservation of forces and organic evolution. The 

 discovery that heat, light, electricity and force were merely modes of 

 motion was the most fundamental of all, even evolution, for it was in a 

 way but its application to organic life. How like a fairy tale it read 

 to me a few years later. 



In biological science the doctrine of evolution has been the founda- 

 tion of our progress. It was only a few years after the founding of this 

 Academy that Darwin published the last of his famous works on evo- 

 lution, "The Descent of Man." Previous to 1872 the world at large 

 took only an academic interest in "Darwinism"; with its application to 

 man himself it became of absorbing interest from the cottage to the pal- 

 ace. And as so often when arguments in refutation failed to convince, 

 ridicule and obloquy took their place. It took years to establish the 

 doctrine, but with its general acceptance among scientific men, a new 

 epoch in biological science began, the epoch of analysis and the search 

 for causes. You will pardon the pride I take in saying that the first 

 public lecture in defense of evolution in the state of Kansas, so far as 

 I am aware, was by myself in 1874 at Manhattan. It was a youthful 

 production, with all the assurance of youth, and I suflFered for it in the 

 public estimation. Dire things were prophesied for my future. I 

 trust that I have outlived my evil repute of those days. 



Even as a boy takes his watch to pieces to see how it is made, we 

 began a half century ago to take things apart, first, like the boy, in the 



