THE SEMI-CENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY 9 1 



SPEECH OF DOCTOR W. W. KEEN 



DR. KEEN: Mr. President, Mr. Toastmaster, Mr. Vice- 

 President, and Gentlemen: It is a great pleasure to me to bear 

 the greetings of the oldest scientific society in America to the 

 National Academy of Sciences, and I am sure I voice their 

 sentiments when I say that we wish you — and we could express 

 no better wish — an equal degree of prosperity and success for 

 the future to that you have had in the past. 



When I received Dr. Woodward's kind letter, if he had asked 

 me to get busy in a professional way and disembarrass the mem- 

 bers of the National Academy of Sciences from the peccant ap- 

 pendix which troubles you all, and which now is working very 

 badly within the dim recesses of your interior, you can imagine 

 how gratefully I should have accepted the task; but when I dis- 

 covered that he had asked me to make an after-dinner speech I 

 was reduced very much to the condition of the Irish soldier who 

 applied for a pension: 



"Where were you hit? " said the surgeon. 



" The bullet went right through here," he said. " No, my 

 man, that would be impossible, for it would have gone straight 

 through your heart, and you would have been a dead man imme- 

 diately." " Sir," he said, "when I was hit I was so scared that 

 my heart was in my mouth." (Applause.) 



If, however, my dull tongue commits as serious wounds upon 

 you as my sharp knife might have done, I am sure that you have 

 brought it upon yourselves. 



The American Philosophical Society had its origin 186 years 

 ago. In 1727 when Benjamin Franklin, who, my friend at my 

 right has wittily said, was not born in Boston, but was born in 

 Philadelphia at 17 years of age (applause) — when he was 21 

 he gathered around him — an extraordinary thing for so young a 

 man — a number of congenial spirits who were interested in sci- 

 entific matters and formed his famous Junto. Sixteen years 

 later, in 1743, from this society, informal as it was, arose in 

 formal manner the American Philosophical Society. It is an 



