710 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION^ 1908. 



Gentlemen, it Avas my good fortune to stand the other day at a spot 

 from which can be seen within eyeshot the birthplaces of science, 

 art, philosophy, the drama — of Europe, of our modern civiliza- 

 tion. It was a great rock rising in the midst of a city built on a 

 plain — -not a boundless, uninteresting expanse, but a plain, defined 

 as such by a cincture of beautiful mountains. I have known many 

 of the loveliest scenes of this wonderful earth, but nothing alto- 

 gether equal to the Attic plain. The rock was the Acropolis, and 

 the setting sun flooded it with light. Upon it rose those ruins 

 which are unsurpassable, unpaintable, and indescribable, because 

 they were built, not only for themselves, but for the visions whi(!h 

 surrounded them — the Propylsea, the Erechtheion, the Parthenon. 

 And who was the god for whom that temple was built — which 

 of all those gods, who are not dead as some imagine, but who 

 live now and will live forever until, as the poet says, " the future 

 dares forget the past " — who live because they are the everlast- 

 ing types of our own spirit ? That goddess whose birth and victory 

 were recorded on the pediments of the Parthenon, who sprang, 

 not from the common zygosis of nature, but full-armed from the 

 head of Zeus, at the touch of fire and toil, who conquered the deep 

 himself. Study her attributes, perceived and recorded in legend by 

 the sages who lived before history was born, and we shall know her. 

 Without human weakness she led Ulysses through the dangers of th(> 

 deep, she gave Perseus the weapons with which he slew the monster 

 of the deep, she destroyed the city of the deep, she made Athens 

 triumph over the deep, and to-day has lifted man in a few cen- 

 turies from the deep to heights unimagined before — science herself. 

 The Parthenon was the temple of science. The great figure of science 

 standing before it dominated the whole of Greece. At its gates, 

 even, stood the figure of Hygeia, the science of health, whom we now 

 invoke. Science is the goddess whom we serve, as did the ancient 

 Athenians, because we know that she and she alone can save us from 

 these elements of the deep which oppress us. We are her servants. 

 We honor not the baser gods — the quack remedies, the sham philan- 

 thropies, the false knowledges, the mock philosophies, the wdiining 

 pities, the lying politics which keep men down in the depths. We 

 acknowledge only the intellect which sees the truth and smites the 

 evil. Let us pray Pallas Athena to revisit the land where she was 

 born. 



