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tific men of the state ; and that they are to enter into its work 

 with interest and energy as worthy of their time and serious at- 

 tention. I would, indeed, make this work worthy of the best 

 thought and service of the best men among us. If we do that, 

 their thought and service, I am sure, will be forthcoming; and 

 if we do not, we shall shortly find that those whose presence 

 and assistance we most need are conspicuous by their absence 

 from our meetings. I must make, also, this assumption of con- 

 tinued success and of high-grade, disinterested service, in what 

 J shall have next to say of the relations of the Academy to the 

 State. If I shall seem to make this topic too prominent at this 

 meeting, paying too little attention to other allied interests, I 

 trust that you will accept my apologies in advance. There are 

 many others far better qualified than I to deal with other as- 

 pects and relations of our work and influence, but if there is 

 any such topic on which I may be thought somewhat competent 

 to speak it is this of our relations to the State, in whose scien- 

 tific service I have really spent, I suppose, a longer time than 

 most of us have lived. 



In all that we may do or propose with respect to general 

 state work, we should of course be sure that we are assisting 

 and strengthening existing active agencies, and not weakening 

 them or supplanting them. We should, in other words, hold 

 and develop what we have, and add to it what and where we 

 can. For this reason any general plan for state-wide work 

 which may be presented to the Academy should be carefully 

 scrutinized and reported upon by a special, disinterested com- 

 mittee, which should act conjointly with any state agency op- 

 erating in the same field. This is essentially the course taken 

 by us with respect to a proposition for an ecological survey 

 of the state made to the Academy by some of our ecological 

 members at its Decatur meeting in 1908. As the survey pro- 

 posed came within the field of operations of the State Labora- 

 tory of Natural History, charged by law with a natural history 

 survey of the state, the forces of the Academy were united with 

 those of the State Lalx)ratory by means of a committee report 

 approved by the Laboratory management and accepted by the 



