IOWA ACADEMY OP SCIENCES. 19 



attitude of Americans thus far has been the former, the cause is 

 not far to seek. The opening up and exploitation of a new 

 continent has up to this time kept our people alive as have 

 been no people elsewhere on the face of the earth, perhaps in 

 all historic time; but that particular form of stimulus is pass- 

 ing. We are fast settling into conditions which are paralleled 

 by the older nations of the world; I may not detail them here, 

 but we all know that the stimulus of natural newness is pass- 

 ing, and I need not tell this audience that in the organized 

 efforts of scientific men, in academies and royal societies, lies 

 the only hope of the promethean fire. Such institutions 

 are the open court of intellectual progress, the focus of 

 inventive life. They, and they alone, foster and feed the 

 inventive spark that shall at length blaze in the open field of 

 discovery. Literature is glorious; but on occasion she hides 

 in cloisters for a thousand years, while outside her gates 

 all the world may slumber; art is wonderful; but art, too, is 

 hemmed in by narrow, self-determined limits; philosophy is 

 reflective, and is wont to lose herself in some far off Nirvana; 

 it remains for science, for science only, to find for the human 

 mind employ unceasing in duration, unlimited in scope, far- 

 reaching in inquiry, beneficent in its purpose, touching with 

 blessing the king in his palace, the poor man in his home, the 

 savage in his hovel. Literature has no new themes. She still 

 seeks her models in the millennia of the past, and turns the 

 kaleidoscope worn by the service of three thousand years; phi- 

 losophy attempts to reason upon data confessedly uncertain, 

 and accordingly from century to century makes little progress ; 

 science alone finds problems forever new, bases her conclus- 

 ions upon facts subject to constant verification, so that in 

 an academy such as this there is perpetual reminder that the 

 bounds of human knowledge are widening, and are yet to 

 be enlarged. 



In no college, in no university, however well organized, do 

 we attain the same result. In a university every phase of 

 human learning has its appropriate place and receives equal 

 consideration; here the scientific method has full sway, naught 

 enters to distract or to disturb, and in the light of friendly 

 criticism each finds the help and encouragement of the other 

 in the sifting of truth or the proclaiming of fact already 

 ascertained. 



In the second place, an academy such as ours is of highest 



