DISCOURSE OF DR. J. C. WELLING. 197 



self-evidencing quality, and a redemptive power which makes it at 

 once a potent and a remedial force in the world. Hence he never 

 descended to any of those controversies which, in the annals of 

 science, have sometimes made the odium scientifieum a species of 

 hatred quite as distinct, and quite as lively, too, as its more ancient 

 congener, the odium theologicum. When once it was sought to force 

 a controversy of this kind upon him, and when accusations were 

 made which seemed to affect his personal honor, as well as the gen- 

 uineness of his scientific claims, he referred the matter for adjudi- 

 cation to the Regents of the Smithsonian. Their investigation and 

 their report dispensed him from the necessity of self-defense. The 

 simple truth was his sufficient buckler. And this equanimity was not 

 simply the result of temperament. It sprang from the largeness of 

 his mind, as well as from the serious view he took of life and duty. 

 He was able to moderate his own opinions, because, in the ampli- 

 tude of his intellectual powers, he was able to be a moderator of 

 opinions in the scientific world. You all know with what felicity 

 and intellectual sympathy he presided over the deliberations of 

 this Society, composed as it is of independent scientific workers in 

 almost every department of modern research. Alike in the judicial 

 temper of his mind and in the wide range of his acquisitions he 

 was fitted to be, as. Dante has said of Aristotle, "the master of those 

 who know." 



And this power of his mind to assimilate knowledge of various 

 kinds naturally leads me to speak of his skill in imparting it. He 

 was a most successful educator. He had many other titles of honor 

 or office, but the title of Professor seemed to rank them all, for 

 everybody felt that he moved among men like one anointed with 

 the spirit and power of a great teacher. And he had philosophical 

 views of education, extending from its primary forms to its highest 

 culminations from the discipline of the "doing faculties" in 

 childhood to the discipline of the " thinking faculties " in youth 

 and manhood. No student of his left the Albany Academy, in the 

 earlier period of his connection with that institution, without being 

 thoroughly drilled in the useful art of handling figures, for then 

 and there he taught the rudimental forms of arithmetic, not so 

 much by theory as by practice. No student of his left Princeton 



