70 PROCEEDINGS OF THE INDIANA ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 



reaching vistas into the future as that which exists between teacher and 

 student. So I say that when I think of the half century that Dr. Dennis 

 devoted to teaching and of the hundred and thousands of men and women, 

 now scattered over the length and breadth of our land, who have come under 

 the inspiring influence of his great personality, my mind fails utterly to grasp 

 the infinite possibilities for good that flow from such a life. 



May I crave your pardon for just a bit of personal reminiscence? As 

 a boy there early dawned in my mind an ardent love for the many things in 

 the great world of Nature about me, and there grew apace the intense and 

 eager desire to learn to know something about all these various forms and the 

 laws of their being. Just about this time some one informed me that there 

 was a man in a college over in ?]astern Indiana who could no doubt tell me 

 all the things I most wished to know. At last the time came for me to go. 

 1 little dreamed of the things that were in store for me there. Under the 

 ))atient guiding hand of this teacher we learned to see and to know many 

 things that had hitherto been a sealed book to us. Through the wonderful 

 eye of the microscope we saw something of the mysterious processes of life 

 unfolding itself, and we were constantly taught to look back through the dim 

 vistas of the past in order to try to understand, as best we could, something 

 of what the history of that life had been on th<' earth. Not only were the 

 beauties and the wonders of many of the forms in Nature's organic kingdom 

 revealed to us, but in the chemical laboratory as well, under his guiding hand, 

 we saw again something of the marvels of the so called inorganic world. 

 There, for the first time, was made known to us something of the strange 

 I)owers of chemical affinity, the wonderful attractions and rejnilsions of mat- 

 ter. And here, too, we were led to see that all was law and that nothing in 

 nature comes about by chance. And, moreover, we learned to see that even 

 in Nature's inorganic kingdom there are marvels past finding out, and above 

 all we came to regard this clayey bulk of earth upon which we dwell, not as 

 so much senseless dirt, inert and lifeless, but rightly understood, teeming with 

 boundless life and full of unlimited potentialities. Indeed the deepest les- 

 son that sank into our lives as we came from the class-room of Professor 

 Dennis was that (lod is not an absentee God but an ever-present God working 

 in his world, and that in the truest imaginable sense each day is a day of 

 creation. With ardor and enthusiasm and a deep and abiding reverence 

 were we taught these things, and not wholly by the spoken word of lecture 

 but as often by the beautiful law of indirection. 



Now the work of the scientist is essentially analytic. It is to dissect 

 and to tear part; yet all too frequently is it the case that science teachers 

 leave their world all disarticulate and torn to bits which is calculated to have 

 a rather chilling and depressing effect upon the student. Dr. Dennis was 

 above all a scientist. The scientific habit of mind was his constant chara- 

 teristic. He was past master in the art of scientific analysis; yet he never 

 left us chilled and depressed or stranded and helpless, for the world that he 



