34 IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 



Columbian Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution, are 

 examples of appreciation as yet as rare as munificent. I 

 am not aware of any such in Iowa. When wealth builds 

 the spacious laboratory or endows a chair in science in any 

 college of the commonwealth, it is but rendering to science 

 her own. Each dollar earned by railway, telegraph and 

 telephone, mine and quarry, mill and factory, farm and 

 store, may well pay tithe to science which has made these 

 industries possible. The gratitude for a life saved by the 

 application of science in modern medicine might well be 

 generous. And yet the total gifts to scientific instruction 

 in Iowa, by men of wealth, do not exceed $50,000. I am 

 aware of the state appropriations to the scientific depart- 

 ments in our state institutions, and I should be glad to call 

 them 'generous. At least they have given Iowa the fame 

 of men whose work in science has achieved national recog- 

 nition. But these yearly appropriations, were they many 

 times as great, could not supply the place of the great 

 gifts, endowments to be for all time reservoirs of power 

 transmuted constantly into the highest social service. It 

 is the boast of American democracy that by such votive 

 offerings it shows appreciation of education, charity, and 

 scientific research. 



As members of a guild of workers in science, let us be 

 thankful for even the humblest place. To discover any 

 fact, however trivial, to add anything however slight, to 

 the sum of human knowledge, this is to shape and dress 

 some stone for the building of science, the home and 

 shelter of the race. Our contribution may go to chink 

 some crevice or at last some master builder may find in it 

 the keystone of an arch or the cap stone of a column, but 

 whatever its place, if our work was well and truly done, it 

 abides, as a permanent service to society. 



