Address by Professor Baldwin. xxxi 



The stimulating effect of the discussions at the ordinary meet- 

 ings of tlie Academy on the life of the community one is liable to 

 underestimate. Here, one after another, each of the great dis- 

 coveries of modern science, of the great advances in modern 

 thought, has been presented by those competent to explain its 

 character and bearings, and made familiar to a company of intelli- 

 gent men, who in turn were sure to diffuse the information so 

 received through a wider circle. 



Thus, the stethoscope was exhibited and its utility demonstrated 

 before the Academy by Dr. Charles Hooker in 1829, when it was 

 still unknown to many of his profession, and distrusted by many 

 more. 



So of the discoveries and conclusions of Professor Marsh in the 

 domain of palaeontology, several were informally communicated 

 to the Academy before they had become the property of the 

 world. In the field of philology, the origin and growth of lan- 

 guage, early discussed, as we have seen, by President Dwight, 

 was taken up, forty years ago, with a profounder scholarship, by 

 Professor Whitney, and the positions stated here which he after- 

 wards advanced in his jjrinted works. It would be easy to refer to 

 others, many of whom are still of us, who have in such ways con- 

 tributed to make the ordinary meetings of the Academy a source 

 of influence and power. 



Its functions, however, have become, as the years go on, divided 

 by sharper and sharper lines. Its unpublished transactions bear 

 little relation to its published transactions. It may not unfairly 

 be said that it prints nothing that has been read before it, and 

 nothing that could be read before it. Our transactions include, 

 as has been stated, much, the germ or antecedents of which have 

 been the subject of an informal talk or brief paper at one of our 

 meetings. But much of the matter is so elaborated and expressed 

 in terms so technical as hardly to be intelligible to any one with- 

 out the aid of plates and figures, and not to be intelligible to most 

 of the author's associates in the Academy, at all. He is speaking 

 to a different audience. The mathematician sends his message to 

 scholars in his line, — to two or three in this foreign university, 

 and two or three in that. The naturalist, in like manner, may 

 interest one man in Vienna, another in Paris, another in Oxford. 

 Neither of these writers, perhaps, could understand, or would care 



