46 ILLINOIS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 
It is really a misfortune that in the great universities only 
advanced and specialized students come into close relations 
with their most eminent teachers, and this is not infrequently 
a cause of complaint. I wonder if it has occurred to those 
who would claim the personal attention of a university's emi- 
nent scholars in the elementary class room that disillusion- 
ment would follow as soon as the stopping of intellectual 
growth had put the idols’ scholarship in the past tense? I 
wonder if it has occurred to those who, as a general principle, 
would accept full time teaching by the clock—even effective 
teaching—as a university professor’s duty, that every man 
who is satisfied to repeat without amplifying, eats bread that 
is craved by some other man as a necessity for acquisition -of 
the knowledge that he himself retails? That is what it comes 
to. 
I am presenting the point of view of a teacher. If I had 
to view the matter as an executive, I am not sure that I should 
not recognize that now and then a university teacher is suc- 
cessful beyond his colleagues in stimulating interest and en- 
thusiasm in something worth while but in which his own pro- 
ductivity is nil. If so, I should recognize his worth; but if he 
enjoyed the privilege of a moderate teaching schedule and 
great unused opportunities for research, I might ask to be 
shown that he really stimulated an interest and enthusiasm 
that seemed foreign to the impulse of his own nature. 
I know of no means so well suited as an organization like 
our own to bringing teachers and investigators together for 
mutual helpfulness. I know of no comparable opportunity for 
humanizing and vitalizing abstract discovery side by side with 
exhibition of the obscure little things that some few have 
eyes to see and through the seeing of which, once understand- 
ing how to look, every one of us may establish and maintain 
that touch with nature which is the mainspring of success- 
ful teaching in science, and which is also the germ of research 
—out of which, with favoring environment, productive schol- 
arship grows in larger units. In our field, the successful 
middle man of necessity is also consumer and producer. This 
Academy is a market in which he may at once buy, sell, and 
negotiate, and at the same time learn. 
