230 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 60 



undoubtedly have been found in the boxes, together with all the para- 

 phernalia of modern electronics. Indeed, many of the materials 

 necessary to bring to light this important realm were there, but they 

 were constructed on a scale too small to be perceived by the eye of 

 man, so they passed notice as useless debris. In this debris would 

 have been found the substances out of which today we make transistors 

 which supply your hearing aids. In the boxes would have been found 

 things which, by proper assembly, would have produced X-rays. 

 Some of them would have contained substances like radium and all 

 the multitude of atoms which today we know as isotopes ; or at least, 

 they would have contained the wherewithal to produce these things 

 which today play such an important part in medicine and industry. 

 In one big box there would have been found the smi itself uttering 

 complaints that the man of science had given him no guarantee that 

 he would be able to go on emitting light practically forever, that the 

 physicist had provided no security for the maintenance of his bank 

 accomit of energy, and that without it he was in danger of degenerat- 

 ing into celestial bankruptcy. 



In those boxes would have been found all the ingredients necessary 

 to produce atomic bombs and provide for the release of atomic energj^ 

 in general. In them would have been found, in a form too small for 

 the eye to see, all the mechanisms necessary to provide for the doings 

 of the greater universe, for the behavior of the stars and the great 

 galaxies of space with all their mysteries, including the continuous 

 production of cosmic rays, and the like. 



Truly, those men of science of three-quarters of a century ago, who 

 left those boxes to the care of underlings for the unraveling of their 

 contents, as the surgeon leaves to his assistants the task of cleaning up 

 the patient, truly these great men of science died with a huge, if un- 

 known, responsibility upon their shoulders. They are almost for- 

 tunate in having died before they were suspected of having left so 

 much unfinished while they had declared that all was, indeed, finished. 



Since man attained the stage of mentality in which he felt the desire 

 to think about himself in relation to his surroundings, he acquired the 

 ambition to understand nature. The basis of such an understanding 

 is an elusive thing. It is by no means obvious. To put the matter in 

 a nutshell, we may perhaps say that, in the past, to understand has 

 been, for man, the ability to see in new phenomena which he studies, 

 nothing more than the operation of the same principles that he has al- 

 ready accepted in the things which he has previously studied. 



THE SCIENCE OF YESTERDAY 



And so, in the beginning, the tilings which man learned to accept 

 were the behavioi-s of beings like himself. Thus, in order to under- 



