4 UNIVERSITi^ OF MISSOURI BULLETIN 



Darwin made virtually a new science of biology, while ap- 

 proximately at the same time the branch of applied biology 

 that comes home most closely to every man's personal interest 

 — the science of pathology — received through Virchow's work 

 its true theoretical basis. And for a generation after 1859 

 there were no revolutions or new beginnings in any science 

 that I can think of, which are comparable to those I have 

 mentioned or to those I am about to mention. 



But what distinguishes the past ten or fifteen years is the 

 fact that four or five sciences at once have been going througli 

 modifications and even revolutions as deep-reaching into fun- 

 damental principles and as far-reaching to ulterior applica- 

 tions as any discovery or new departure that has ever hap- 

 pened in any of them. Never, I believe, have so significant 

 and profound innovations and reconstructions been realized in 

 so many provinces at any one time. Since most of this 

 faculty left college — and we are not a very elderly faculty — 

 the accepted primary doctrines or the ruling methods or the 

 favorite problems of physics, of chemistry, of biology, even 

 of mathematics, have been, not simply enormously expanded, 

 but virtually recast. By this I do not mean that the older 

 doctrines of those sciences have been falsified, though to some 

 extent this has happened too ; I mean that, at all events, these 

 sciences have gained new fundamental problems to work at, 

 new guiding principles and primary hypotheses to employ, and 

 new conceptions of their own scope, relations and possibilities. 

 And the result of this is that you will usually find the leaders 

 of those sciences just now flushed with an ardor and enthu- 

 siasm that come even more from the sense of great possibili- 

 ties ahead than from the sense of great achievements just 

 behind — though with an enthusiasm commonly sobered and 

 steadied by the recollection of past aberrations of science and 

 by the revelations which the new knowledge itself brings of 

 the limits of our present scientific insight and of the once un- 

 suspected complexity of the factors involved in the phenom- 

 ena yet to be understood. 



