308 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1944 
conversation once he discovers you are a zoologist. All too often he 
amusingly, likewise tragically, attempts to recall a name—oh, yes, 
he says, I studied zoology once. Let me see, what is the name for 
oysters and clams? * * * That man has seen the trees. I won- 
der whether he was ever shown the woods; whether he was trained in 
anything but bare facts. And I wonder too whether, perhaps still 
more unfortunately, the significance of significances was ever appre- 
ciated by his instructors. 
The trees and not the woods loomed large in the remarks made by 
a colleague of mine, a purveyor of the humanities, on the occasion of 
a round-table discussion between a faculty group and students on the 
ever-recurring topic of science and religion. The immediate ques- 
tion at issue was the relation of scientific facts to religion. My col- 
league was of the opinion that the two could be in no wise related. 
By way of illustration he pointed to the facts of meteorology; certain 
conditions of temperature, moisture, atmospheric movement we 
know result in rain. How can that knowledge possibly have any 
connection with religion, he queried. The answer, as we well know, 
is simple. This certainty of results which the meteorological facts 
represent takes much of the mystery and consequent uncertainty out 
of the comings and goings of the weather. To just that extent we 
feel secure and in harmony with the powers that ride the storm. 
My colleague’s query did double duty. It revealed the barren trees 
of both science and religion but the woods of neither. The funda- 
mental yearning which the appeal to religion strives to fulfill is 
the yearning for security, a yearning which grips all of us. We 
tremble before the overpowering uncertainties of enveloping fate, 
the unknowable, and strive to achieve a harmonious relationship 
through religious experience. The woods, which apparently neither 
the scientific nor the religious experiences of my colleague had 
revealed to him, were that just as the all-compelling quest manifested 
through religion is the quest for security, so the all-embracing fruit 
of science is to afford security; the security that frees from the bonds 
of uncertainty and superstition and soothes the troubled soul with 
the peace that passeth understanding. 
This doctrine of security, the teaching that we live in an environ- 
ment ordéred by dependable, understandable principles is as old as 
science itself, the leit motif that has threaded its guiding way through 
scientific thought throughout the ages from the times of the early 
Ionian teachers to the present. As F. H. Pike? reminds us in a pub- 
lished note within the year, “One great change which occurred in the 
period from Thales to Plato was the substitution of a world, perhaps 
even a universe, of law for the older world of caprice.” And with it 
3 Science, April 24, 1942. 
