41 



value as an aid to education, as a foundation for more im- 

 mediately productive operations, and as helping to create a 

 background of appreciation for the work of the state agencies 

 themselves. It is in this sense that it seems perfectly proper 

 that the State of Illinois should provide at its own expense, as 

 so many other states have done, for the publication of the 

 Transactions of its State Academy of Science, Whatever tends 

 to stimulate a general activity in scientific work throughout the 

 state and to increase the public interest in it; whatever makes 

 available for the general public the product of valuable unpaid 

 services of private citizens; whatever helps to familiarize our 

 people with the true objects and methods and the outcome of 

 scientific investigation, will have consequences, immediate and 

 remote, so important to the public welfare, material, intellectual, 

 and social, that the petty sums needed for the publication of 

 our papers will certainly, as it seems to me, be invested at an 

 enormous rate of final profit. 



It is especially in this period of an emotional reaction against 

 science and the scientific method, when whole sections and sects 

 of our people seem' fairly rushing down a steep place intO' the 

 sea of fantastical speculation and conjecture, that we need in 

 «very community the sane, cool, impartial spirit of science, at 

 work along all lines of intellectual activity. It is not an empty 

 reproach which Professor John Dewey, of Columbia University, 

 brings against those of us who are science teachers, in his 

 recent address as chairman of the educational section of the 

 American Association for the Advancement of Science, when 

 he speaks of the slight extent to which the teaching of science 

 lias hitherto protected the so-called educated public against the 

 recrudescence of all sorts of occultism, superstition, and silli- 

 ness. "The future of our civilization," he continues, "depends 

 upon the widening spread and deepening hold of the scientific 

 habit of mind ; and the problem of problems in our education 

 is, therefore, to discover how to mature and make effective this 

 scientific habit. Scientific method is not just a method which it 

 has been found profitable to pursue in this or that abstruse subject 

 for purely technical reasons. It represents the only method of 



