58 Kansas Academy of Science. 



Sermon on the Mount be heard in the living voice of Christ to-day; to 

 send human messages about the earth through the air with the speed 

 of light; to look through what seemed opaque things; and to fly through 

 the air with the speed and freedom of birds. They almost seem, even 

 yet, to those of us who remember the time when they were not, like 

 the dreams of a disordered mind. 



In the biological sciences the records of progress in these years are 

 no less startling. How commonplace have many of these new things 

 become to us in our familiarity with them; how greatly have they modi- 

 fied and are modifying the conditions of human existence. 



On the borderland between botany and zoology, among those curious 

 organisms that Haeckel once called the Protista, the discoveries of the 

 parts microorganisms play in our happiness and our welfare are most 

 profound. Bacteria, long mere curiosities to the curious, we have recog- 

 nized as our greatest enemies and our greatest friends among living 

 things, perhaps the greatest of all factors in the development of our 

 race. The germ theory of the early eighties was received, I can well 

 remember, with incredulity; its application to human needs has saved 

 myriads of lives, untold tortures and untold anguish. The mother 

 blesses the day when Pasteur recognized their instrumentality in dis- 

 ease, that saves the babe in her arms. The soldier on the battle field 

 is saved from greater foes than the enemies' guns by that same dis- 

 covery. 



And microzoa, curious creatures they were when this Academy was 

 born; deadly enemies that slay their millions we now know them to be. 

 Mosquitoes, tzetze flies, lice, ticks, rats, then were only annoying vermin; 

 we have recognized them now as hosts of our deadliest enemies. To 

 conquer our enemies we must first know them ; we are learning to know 

 them in these years, and whether in the laboratory or on the battle field 

 we shall conquer them. Cholera, typhoid fever, diphtheria, malaria, 

 yellow fever, typhus, sleeping sickness, bubonic plague, have been un- 

 masked. We are driving them from their trenches, and some day we 

 shall conquer the enemy in the great white plague and he shall be no 

 more upon earth. Never again will cholera or black death reap their 

 deadly harvests of the past. Anaesthesia was young when our record 

 begins; it has saved untold suffering in these fifty years. But aseptic 

 and antiseptic surgery was a greater boon, for it has saved untold lives. 

 These discoveries are perhaps not as spectacular as some we have re- 

 counted, but who could wish to live in those dark ages of medical science 

 when we knew them not? 



Botany is no longer merely the collection and labeling of plants, 

 the science I studied when a boy. It is now a group of sciences, each far 

 greater in extent than the whole subject of those days, aside from 

 bacteriology a science now primarily of plant functions, habits, heredity 

 — physiology, ecology and genetics. To a botanist is due the discovery 

 of the far-reaching law of inheritance, Mendel's law. And De Vries, 

 whatever may be the significance of his discoveries of mutation, placed 

 the whole science on an experimental basis. The study of the vascular 

 anatomy of plants and its service in plant genealogy has transformed 



