18 IOWA ACADKMY OF SCIENCES. 



America among our more active people The influence of a 

 great intellectual center is not limited to the roster of its 

 organization. The University of Michigan has educated the 

 whole northwest, has influenced you and me, though we may 

 never have seen its stately halls. And so I take it with an 

 Academy like this; its work is far-reaching as the state 

 among our own people, and far-reaching as science among the 

 nations of the world; this by mere virtue of its existence, and 

 all apart and distinct from the work it has been able to 

 accomplish. The spectacle presented year by year of from three 

 to four score, or more, intelligent men assembling at their own 

 cost to discuss themes which offer no pecuniary returns, 

 present or prospective, is at least sufficiently significant in 

 this mercenary age of ours to demand attention. But there is 

 something more. The problems we here discuss escape at 

 length these halls, reach the public press, the firesides of the 

 common people, and then who shall estimate the wide influ- 

 ence of the Academy as a constant impulse to intellectual life, 

 more and more manifest and in every way most potent. Every 

 discovery made by any member of this Academy, every new 

 list of plants, every new bed of clay, every planed pebble or 

 fossil tooth, every public discussion of printed report, stirs as 

 nothing else the intellectual life of the community where such 

 discovery appears or is reported, and redeems such segment of 

 our population, in so far, from that fearful stagnation into 

 which, apart from such stirring, humanity is so prone to fall. 

 Our present popular and highly successful geological survey 

 reaching as it does one after the other, in a most efficient way, 

 every county in the state, is doing a wonderful work in the 

 direction indicated, and I believe it is not too much to say that 

 that survey is in a large measure due to the suggestion and 

 organized effort of this Academy. At any rate, the survey is but 

 carrying out in a more methodic and systematic way the work 

 which has constantly largely engaged us here. 



It is well for us thoroughly to understand this matter and 

 betimes to put it clearly before the world. There are, as all 

 history testifies, but two possible attitudes of the human mind; 

 the one responsive to the stimulus of the external world, an 

 attitude of inquiry, effort, search after truth with consequent 

 ennobling glorious progress; the other an attitude of resigna- 

 tion, inactivity, a study of death rather than life, with result- 

 ant torpor, dry rot, necrosis of every noble power. If the 



