IOWA ACADEMY OP SCIENCES. 33 



The theory of evolution perhaps furnishes one of the 

 best examples of the replacement of the untruths of the 

 past by truths discovered by science and of their revolu- 

 tionary effect. Since the discovery of the proofs of this 

 process, man has come to know himself as never before. 

 He understands at least the meaning of history and 

 rewrites his texts on philology, literature and all social 

 and political institutions. He sees, though as yet dimly, 

 some solution to the ethical problems of sin and evil, and 

 beholds as in ai panorama the process of his creation. 



It is as yet too soon to see the full effect of these new 

 conceptions upon the social mind. Science has not yet 

 come to its own in education, and the irrational and the 

 unreal is far from being wholly banished from society. 

 But more and more the care of the young is entrusted to 

 science to train, as none other can, to be quick of eye, true 

 of speech and rational in thought, to bring them face to- 

 face with reality and to open to their view the widest and 

 most inspiring vistas. Common knowledge is one of the 

 strongest social bonds. We meet and touch in what we 

 know. The time has been when educated men drew 

 together in a common knowledge of phrases written in- 

 extinct languages. To-day they find this reapproachmenty 

 this consciousness of kind, more and more in a common 

 training in science. In the laboratory they have meas- 

 ured the energy of the falling body and studied its trans- 

 formation into sound, heat, light, chemism, and electricity; 

 they have tested the ray from the hydrogen atom and 

 found its vibration the same from the fiame on the table 

 and in the light of Sirius. They have dissected the tissues 

 of life, and have read in Nature's book the life histories of- 

 mountain, river and planet. And thus they have attaine(J 

 to that cosmic conception, overwhelming in its sublimity,, 

 which is the best gift of science to man. 



The reward which science asks for this service is the 

 wages of going on; she asks for well equipped laboratories, 

 for longer courses of scientific study in schools, for the 

 endowment of scientific instruction and research. Such 

 foundations as the Lawrence Scientific school, the Field 



3 



