40 ILLINOIS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 
of scholarship and founding new sciences and new industries 
now well established as not only valuable, but essential, while 
making their own subsistence through practicing some voca- 
tion or profession already established in the social system. 
Today the same groping for new things is going on in every 
one of these newer sciences and industries. Inherited wealth, 
the production in remunerative quantities of marketable goods 
or ideas, or leisure for following a predisposition while earning 
a living, have been the foundation of these advances: they 
constitute today the support on which most progress rests; but 
this is being strengthened and broadened by special provision 
for enabling the exceptional man to use better or to the best, 
the talent that marks him as exceptional—in originality, in- 
telligent interest and industry. 
Through these conditions it has come about that our larg- 
est social system, the most essential and best organized after 
government itself—that of education—has afforded to teach- 
ers, indirectly, opportunity for expansion in the field of schol- 
arship and discovery, while invention and the application of 
discoveries have been promoted directly in proportion to their 
money-earning worth, Profitable invention and popular au- 
thorship are not taught in the schools; in rare cases they may 
not rest on scholarship as measured by the common standards ; 
but they nevertheless mark exceptional, often unique, talent, 
and their reward, larger than that of the scholar, is admittedly 
just and merited. 
A body like the Illinois Academy of Science is essentially a 
body of teachers: teachers in the primary schools, teachers in 
the secondary schools, teachers in the colleges, teachers in the 
universities. It is organized to promote stimulating personal 
intercourse and the interchange of ideas and information; and, 
in a lesser degree, to give opportunity for bettering methods, 
avoiding wasteful duplication of effort, and effective co-oper- 
ation for achievement of the greatest possible collective results. 
Its membership consists largely—too exclusively, as I feel—of 
teachers, but every teacher within its geographic field owes it 
to himself and to every other teacher to be actively interested 
in such an organization. . 
As a nation we are coming to feel that national life can be 
assured only through that most elemental sort of ability that 
