EARLY YEARS OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION. 501 



emotional life of childhood, in the desires and feelings. It must 

 allow these to express themselves in sincere action. It must 

 preserve inviolate the causal chain of desire, action, sensation, 

 thought. Its philosophy must be monistic. It must hold fast to 

 the organic unity of the child. 



3. That the proper agents for carrying out this method and 

 gaining this end are the best men and women that society has 

 produced, the very flower of the race, men and women of large 

 experience and broad culture in whom the pulse of life beats 

 quick and high ; not bookworms, not artisans, not fragments of 

 any sort whatever, but men and women to whom Nature and cir- 

 cumstances have been kind, who have caught sight of the vision 

 of the complete life, and who would make this vision prevail. 



EARLY YEARS OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION. 



By WILLIAM HENKY HALE, Ph. D., 



FELLOW OF THE ASSOCIATION. 



IN this age of increasing specialization and multiplying socie- 

 ties and organizations of specialists it is well that there still 

 remaius an association broad enough to include the entire range 

 of scientific thought and activity, and comprehensive enough to 

 welcome all who have the disposition to explore any field in the 

 vast domain of science. 



The American Association for the Advancement of Science 

 has now for nearly half a century been a powerful factor in stimu- 

 lating the progress of scientific research in America. Similar 

 associations are found in other countries. The pioneer of all is 

 the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which 

 was founded at York, England, in 1832. The period following 

 this epoch was marked by a great outburst of the spirit of re- 

 search and investigation among the English-speaking people. 

 In America the science which gained the greatest number of 

 adherents and was prosecuted most vigorously was geology. 

 During the decade following the organization of the British As- 

 sociation, James Hall was laying the foundations of that science 

 in America by his explorations of the strata of the State of New 

 York ; Bela Hubbard was exploring the new State of Michigan ; 

 Benjamin Silliman was teaching at Yale ; James D. Dana com- 

 pleted his college course as a pupil of Silliman, and already made 

 a name for himself in scientific circles ; and Edward Hitchcock 

 was finding the puzzling fossil footprints of primeval reptiles, so 

 long erroneously called "bird tracks," along the valley of the 

 Connecticut. 



