428 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1946 
is the path which leads to contact with the greatest current thoughts 
and the most brilliant achievements of man. 
Nor does that study lead only to a coldly impersonal intellectual 
stimulation. Properly approached, science presents aspects trans- 
cendently inspiring to the imagination and arousing emotion border- 
ing on the sublime. Edward Fitzgerald, himself a poet who, in the 
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam has given us one of the masterpieces of 
our literature, has said, “Yes, as I often think, it is not the poetical 
imagination but science that every day more and more unrolls a greater 
epic than the Iliad.” And another poet, Alfred Noyes, in Watchers of 
the Sky wrote— 
Yet we, who are borne on one dark grain of dust 
Around one indistinguishable spark 
Of star-mist, lost in one lost feather of light, 
Can, by the strength of our own thought, ascend 
Through universe after universe; trace their growth 
Through boundless time, their glory, their decay; 
And, on the invisible road of law, more firm 
Than granite, range through all their length and breadth, 
Their height and depth, past, present and to come. 
Year after year the slow sure records grow, 
Awaiting their interpreter. They shall see it, 
Our sons, in that far day, the swift, the strong, 
The triumphing young-eyed runners with the torch. 
No deep-set boundary-mark in Space or Time 
Shall halt or daunt them. Who that once has seen 
How truth leads on to truth, shall ever dare 
To set a bound to knowledge? 
For the acquisition of some knowledge and appreciation of man’s 
greatest intellectual achievements, no other study can rank so high as 
science. 
SCIENCE CREATES SOCIAL CHANGES 
Science study is necessary also for a true understanding of the 
forces which are shaping our social and economic development. A. 
J. Balfour said more than 30 years ago. 
Science is the great instrument of social change, all the greater because its 
object is not change but knowledge, and its silent appropriation of this dominant 
function, amid the din of political and religious strife, is the most vital of all the 
revolutions which have marked the development of modern civilization. 
Should anyone think this an overstatement, let him consider the 
following facts. It is science and its applications that have so in- 
creased the productivity of agriculture as to abrogate the Malthusian 
law of growth of populations, transformed our economy from the 
purely agricultural to the largely industrial; provided the swift 
transportation, both horizontally and vertically, which has fostered 
