1903] Sigma Xi 



Mutterseite? " (And has he perhaps poet blood on the 

 mother's side?) This set me back a little, though 

 hardly more so than the question of another good 

 lady who once sweetly asked: "And do you love 

 Nature in all her varied moods of light and shade?" 



The scientific honor society of Sigma Xi, as else- 

 where indicated, 1 was established in 1896. At its 

 first national banquet, held at St. Louis in the fall of 

 1903, I gave the "keynote address," using as a sort 

 of text Emerson's words, "The globe is transparent 

 law, not a mass of facts." Law, I stated, is the The rule 

 observed relation of cause and effect. In the universe f law 

 nothing is lawless, not even the wayward human will, 

 though its stimuli and reactions are too delicately 

 balanced to be measured by our instruments of pre- 

 cision. Each peculiarity of structure, each char- 

 acter or quality of individual or species, has a mean- 

 ing or a cause. Every fact clamors for interpretation. 

 By a solid mastery of "existing causes" we can restore 

 the past and forecast the future. 



Returning from St. Louis by the way of Kansas, I 

 sat near a muscular, energetic, stern-faced woman 

 who started a conversation with her seat mate, a 

 voluble disciple of Karl Marx. The discussion inter- 



Those times are gone, and now we sit bloated with other's kill 



But the call of God's own earth comes strong, and we heed it as God's will; 



We go to the open spaces, we go to the forest dim; 



We go on the mighty waters, we camp on the blue lake's rim; 



We lie on the endless marshes, to match with the flocking ducks; 

 We force through the tearing rapids, we answer the antlered bucks; 

 We go back to the ways of our fathers, we do as they did then 

 We live the life God meant us to, we live the life of men! 



May 3, 1919 



1 See Vol. I, Chapter in, page 61. 



n 145 n 



