56 Kansas Academy of Science. 



mere spirit of curiosity to see how they were made, later to find out the 

 laws that govern their construction and to make other things. Analysis 

 must necessarily be the antecedent of synthesis, and synthesis is con- 

 structive science. Science for centuries had been more the search for 

 things to prove theories, the handmaid of philosophy. In these years 

 science has been preeminently in the search for theories to explain facts, 

 the mistress of philosophy. It has been in the search for causes and 

 the application of causes in reconstruction. And all this has brought 

 about the correlation of underlying causes, the correlation of the sciences. 

 Then the chief sciences were like islands in a great expanse of water 

 of unknown depths; now they are for the most part united into one 

 land with only valleys at the most between them. Physics and chemistry 

 have been called upon for the explanation of geological and biological 

 phenomena. Physiology and pathology have become merely the physics 

 and chemistry of life; paleontology the history of geology, and so on 

 to the end. And, ever and anon we gaze in amazement at the new fields 

 opening before us in the application of one science to the explanation of 

 another science. 



In the science of the universe the application of the spectroscope, dis- 

 covered only a little earlier, to the determination of the constitution of 

 the sun and stars, has been marvelous in its results; and it has found 

 many new uses. And the application of photography, which antedates 

 our Academy's history not many years, has all been made during these 

 years with equally marvelous results. The larger part of our present 

 knowledge of the sidereal universe has been acquired since 1868. The 

 modern telescope is twenty-five times more powerful than the telescope 

 of the sixties; our vision has been enlarged a million times. The de- 

 termination of the earth's interior, as rigid and elastic as though com- 

 posed of steel, has been a discovery of recent years, a discovery which 

 bids fair to revolutionize all our conceptions of the dynamics of the 

 earth. 



In geology a better conception of the origin and structure of the earth 

 marks a new epoch in its history. The earth has not been growing colder 

 from a primitive ball of fire; its molten interior no longer exists, and 

 vulcanology has become a new science. An earth of elastic rigidity 

 explains better the base leveling of the continents and the periodic 

 oscillations of the oceans, and indeed all of the great earth movements 

 of the past, and the intimate part they play in its history. 



When this Academy was founded I was taught that the boulders scat- 

 tered over our hills had been dropped there from mighty icebergs in a 

 universal ocean of our continent. But there came a new science of glaci- 

 ology, and a history of their past in Paleocene, Permian, Cambrian and 

 Proteozoic times. And all these new conceptions of the earth have 

 thrown a flood of light upon the climates and life of the past. And the 

 science of physiography has been born in these years. 



When Mudge was the state geologist of Kansas he was thought to 

 be a wizard, to unlock all the hidden treasures of the earth. If gold 

 and silver were to be found in Colorado, why not in Kansas? Coal was 

 sought for on the highest bluffs and precious metals and stones in the 



