THE OUTLOOK. 



The acquisition of knowledge always results in the revelation of 

 wider and yet wider prospects tempting inquiry and inviting explor- 

 ation. To the Pythagoreans life and the universe were fairly simple, 

 a few rules when once discovered would, they felt sure, reduce the 

 seeming chaos to order. In the laws of number lay the simple clue to 

 the whole riddle. To Descartes, two thousand years later in the history 

 of man and of science, how much more complex did the world appear. 

 Yet even he thought that the phenomena of life could be interpreted 

 by geometry and hydrostatics and that emotions arose through oscil- 

 lations of the Pineal gland, originating from the varying pressures of 

 an impinging fluid. But three-quarters of a century later, Newton, 

 incomparably the greatest discoverer of his age, gazed in awe and 

 humility upon the limitless prospect which his labors had revealed: 

 " I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem 

 to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting 

 myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell 

 than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before 

 me. ' ' A new ocean of undiscovered truth : that is the revelation which 

 we glean from every fresh achievement of the scientific method, and 

 this is essentially its most inspiring outcome. 



It is refreshing, from time to time, to pause amid the fruits of our 

 collective labors and gaze upon the widened prospect which lies before 

 us, striving to make out the dim form of truths which are emerging, 

 half- veiled in the mists of the early dawn of knowledge, upon the 

 horizon of our inquiries. 



In the territory with which we are here most particularly concerned; 

 that territory which lies upon the borderland of life and of atomic 

 affinities, and seeks to illumine the one with the beacon-lights of the 

 other; the unexplored oppresses us with its vastness and entices us 

 with its promise, while the known, the sure ground of fact, comprises 

 only the fringe of our future heritage of knowledge. In the prospect 

 which lies before us certain objectives lie plainly outlined and almost 

 within our grasp, others are less clearly apprehended and others, again, 

 loom gigantic, unformed, terrible in their potentialities for good or 

 for evil, upon the ultimate horizon of our outlook. 



In the forefront of our prospect lie, patently enough, the vast 

 industrial potentialities of our science, barely touched as yet, but 

 destined in the near future to be a rich field of endeavor, promising 

 inexhaustible resources of wealth and power, the physical foundations 

 of intellectual achievement. The accumulated storehouses of fuel, 



