38 JOHN J. STEVENSON 



other industries of his own land and of the continent. At 

 his death he bequeathed milhons of dollars to the Swedish 

 Academy of Sciences that the income might be expended 

 in encouraging pure research. Smithson, Hodgkins, and 

 Nobel have marked out a path which should be crowded 

 with Americans. 



The endowment of research is demanded now as never 

 before. The development of technical education, the in- 

 tellectual training of men to fit them for positions formerly 

 held by mere tyros, has changed the material conditions in 

 America. The surveyor has disappeared — none but a civil 

 engineer is trusted to lay out even town lots; the founder 

 at an iron furnace is no longer merely a graduate of the cast- 

 ing house — he must be a graduate in metallurgy; the man- 

 ufacturer of paints cannot entrust his factory to any but 

 a chemist of recognized standing; no graduate of the pick 

 is placed in charge of mines — a mining engineer alone can 

 gain confidence; and so everywhere. With the will to util- 

 ize the results of science there has come an intensity of com- 

 petition in which victory belongs only to the best equipped. 

 The profit awaiting successful inventors is greater than ever, 

 and the anxious readiness to apply scientific discoveries is 

 shown by the daily records. The Rontgen rays were seized 

 at once and efforts made to find profitable application; the 

 properties of zirconia and other earths interested inventors 

 as soon as they were announced; the possibility of telegraph- 

 ing without wires incited inventors everyvi^here as soon as the 

 principle was discovered. 



Nature's secrets are still unknown and the field for in- 

 vestigation is as broad as ever. We are only on the thresh- 

 old of discovery, and the coming century will disclose won- 

 ders far beyond any yet disclosed. The atmosphere, studied 

 by hundreds of chemists and physicists for a full century, 

 proved for Rayleigh and Ramsay an unexplored field within 

 this decade. We know nothing yet. We have gathered a 

 few large pebbles from the shore, but the mass of sands is 

 yet to be explored. 



And now the moral has been drawn. The pointing 

 is simple. If America, which, more than other nations, 



