174 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1918. 



veloped new kinds of transformers the existence of which was never 

 dreamed, of before — all these things are coming now, it is not in the 

 distant future, that we are going to find the applications; we have 

 found in the last five years a great quantity of them, and how many 

 more are going to come, no man can tell. 



And yet we must not focus our attention too intently upon the 

 utility of a discovery. Did you ever hear the story of what happened 

 when Faraday was making before the Royal Society in 1831 that 

 experiment to which your chairman referred? He performed his 

 experiment, and then explained it. It was simple, it did not look 

 particularly interesting. One saw only a deflection of a needle. And 

 some woman in the audience said, " But Prof. Faraday, of what use 

 is it? " His reply was, "Madam, will you tell me of what use is a 

 new born babe?" — and what a reply it was! Infinite possibilities — 

 possibilities which may indeed not be realized, but at any rate some- 

 thing altogether new. Faraday did not care of what immediate use 

 that new thing was, for he was one of the great souls who had caught 

 the spirit of Galileo. He knew that human progress depends pri- 

 marily upon the growth of the human mind, the ability of man to 

 get hold of nature. The utilities might come, they always do come, 

 but they generally crop out as by-products, and the man who has 

 got his mind fixed merely on utilities is simply the man who kills 

 the hen to get the golden egg. I have just as much respect for utili- 

 ties as you or anybody has ; I believe that nothing is worth while ex- 

 cept as it contributes in the end to human progress, but the difficulty 

 is that you can not tell, nor can I nor anybody else tell, what is going 

 to contribute to human progress. The thing that is important is 

 that the human mind should grow. That is the sine qua non of 

 progress. At the capitol in Harrisburgh there is a picture by Sir 

 Edwin Abbey, which is entitled, " "Wisdom, or the Spirit of Science." 

 It consists of a female veiled figure with the forked lightnings in 

 one hand, and in the other the owl and the serpent, the symbols of 

 mystery ; and beneath is the inscription : 



" I am what is, what hath been and what shall be. 



My veil has been disclosed by none. 



What I have brought forth is this: The sun is born." 



It is to lighten man's understanding, to illuminate his path through 

 life, and not merely to make it easy, that science exists. Hence, if 

 you ask me what are the utilities of the particular category of dis- 

 coveries which I am going to run over here very rapidly, I may be 

 able to tell you of a good many of them, but I shall not try to 

 catalogue them all, because that is not where our immediate interest 

 lies. It is " where there is no vision " that " the people perish." 



Finally, before launching upon the sea of recent discovery, I 

 wish to make one more remark about the method of science — namety, 



