86 THE SCIENTIFIC PLAN OF THE CONGRESS 



country and city, Orient and Occident, were all to be focussed for 

 a few summer months in the ivory city of the Mississippi Valley. It 

 seemed most natural that science and productive scholarship should 

 also find its characteristic place among the factors of our modem 

 civilization. Of course the scientist had his word to say on almost every 

 square foot of the Exposition. Whether the building was devoted to 

 electricity or to chemistry, to anthropology or to metallurgy, to civic 

 administration or to medicine, to transportation or to industrial arts, 

 it was everywhere the work of the scientist which was to win the tri- 

 umph; and the Palace of Education, the first in any universal exposi- 

 tion, was to combine under its roof not only the school work of all 

 countries, but the visible record of the world's universities and tech- 

 nical schools as well. And yet it seemed not enough to gather the 

 products and records of science and to make science serve with its 

 tools and inventions. Modern art, too, was to reign over every hall 

 and to beautify every palace, and yet demanded its own unfolding in 

 the gallery of paintings and sculptures. In the same way it was not 

 enough for science to penetrate a hundred exhibitions and turn the 

 wheels in every hall, but it must also seek to concentrate all its ener- 

 gies in one spot and show the cross-section of human knowledge in 

 our time, and, above all, its own methods. 



An exhibition of scholarship cannot be arranged for the eyes. The 

 great work which grows day by day in quiet libraries and laboratories, 

 and on a thousand university platforms, can express itself only 

 through words. Yet heaped up printed volumes would be dead to 

 a World's Fair spectator; how to make such words living was the 

 problem. Above all, scholarship does not really exhibit its methods, 

 if it does not show itself in production. It is no longer scholarship 

 which speaks of a truth-seeking that has been performed instead of 

 going on with the search for further truth. If the world's science was 

 to be exhibited, a form had to be sought in which the scholarly 

 work on the spot would serve the ideals of knowledge, would add to 

 the storehouse of truth, and would thus work in the service of human 

 progress at the same moment in which it contributed to the com- 

 pleteness of the exhibition. 



The effort was not without precedent. Scholarly production had 

 been connected with earlier expositions, and the large gatherings of 

 scholars at the Paris Exposition were still in vivid memory. A large 

 number of scientific congresses of specialists had been held there, and 

 many hundred scholarly papers had been read. Yet the results hardly 

 suggested the repetition of such an experiment. Every one felt too 

 strongly that the outcome of such disconnected congresses of special- 

 ists is hardly comparable with the glorious showing which the arts 

 and industries have made and were to make again. In every other 

 department of the World's Fair the most careful preparation secured 



