72 NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



medal to His Excellency the Minister from Norway. (Ap- 

 plause.) 



President Wilson: Your Excellency, it would have been 

 most agreeable to us if we could have seen your fellow country- 

 man who has looked into matters so deep and unstable, but it is 

 a great pleasure in his absence, to put this medal into your hands 

 for transmission to him, and to express to you our appreciation of 

 his work and of your own relations with the United States. 

 (Applause.) 



Dr. Woodward : Our late colleague in the Academy, General 

 Cyrus Buel Comstock, member of the Corps of Engineers of 

 the United States Army, won distinction as Chief Engineer on 

 the Staff of General Grant during the great Civil Conflict. But 

 in the pursuit of his arduous vocation he found time also for the 

 cultivation of science, and he is not less distinguished for his 

 contributions to geodesy than for his service in the evolution of 

 our Commonwealth. 



His devotion to physical science is witnessed in his last will 

 and testament, by which he conveyed to the Academy a fund 

 the income from which may be used for the promotion of re- 

 searches in electricity, magnetism and radiant energy. Under 

 the terms and conditions of this fund the Academy now makes 

 its first award under the designation " Comstock Prize " of the 

 sum of $1500 to Professor Robert Andrews Millikan of the 

 University of Chicago. 



It is a far cry from the adumbrations of Democritus and 

 Lucretius to the modern doctrine of atomicity. But the demon- 

 stration of this doctrine, dimly foreseen more than twenty cen- 

 turies ago is the greatest achievement in physical science of the 

 past two decades, and one of the greatest in the history of science. 

 It is now proved not only that what we call gross matter is atomic, 

 but that what we call electricity has also a granular or atomic 

 structure. With rare acumen and with rare experimental skill 

 Professor Millikan has furnished the most direct and the most 

 convincing proof of the existence of electric atoms or elements. 



