202 PROCEEDINGS OF '. iE OHIO ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 



favorable for the development of scientitic ability of a high 

 order as they were forty or fifty years ago, and that in relative 

 proportion to the number of students of science, then and now, 

 fewer men possessing talent of the first rank are likely to appear 

 during the present century than we know to have lived in the 

 nineteenth. 



I know it demands courage akin to recklessness to make 

 such a prediction, and in self defense I ask you to give serious 

 consideration to the generally admitted fact that within the last 

 twenty-five years there has been a remarkable change, amount- 

 ing to a revolution, in the intellectual life of the people as a 

 whole ; that this change has permeated all classes of society 

 and that it threatens to result, nay, indeed that, it has already re- 

 sulted in an enervation of the intellectual faculties with paralysis 

 not far away. During the "sixties and seventies" of the last 

 century the lyceum flourished ; men and women flocked to hear 

 such orators and thinkers as Lowell. Beecher, Sumner, Wendell 

 Phillips, Emerson and others of nearly equal rank and reputa- 

 tion. Louis Agassiz lectured to crowded houses in all of our 

 principal cities. Tyndall and Huxley came from across the sea 

 to give scientific lectures in our largest halls from the doors of 

 which hundreds were turned away. In the city of Columbus, 

 with a population not more than one quarter of that at present 

 the largest audience room was packed with interested listeners, 

 while some of the ablest scientific men in this country and 

 Europe discoursed on such topics as "The Doctrine of Evo- 

 lution ;" "Spectnmi Analysis;" "The Stars and Nebulae;" 

 "Geologic Time" etc., etc. While all of these lectures were made 

 interesting by the accomplished men who gave them, their dis- 

 tinctive characteristic was that every listener was sent home 

 with something to think about. 



The "tired business man" had not then been invented. 

 Country clubs, bridge whist, high-power cars, vaudeville shows, 

 moving pictures and grotesque dances had not yet appeared 

 above the horizon. The gospel of amusement had not yet been 

 revealed. Books were vastly fewer then than now and, in the 

 opinion of many of us today, correspondingly better, most of 



