cxx 



The continual accession of new members is a matter of further congratu- 

 lation. The provision made for the preservation and exhibition of your 

 Museum should encourage on all hands zealous cooperation in collecting 

 specimens, and a few years of such effort would in a great measure make 

 good the disaster which overtook the Academy's Museum in 1869. 



While affairs are thus prosperous within our organization, the cause in 

 whose name we assemble. Science — and more especial ly Natural Science — 

 is in a state of extraordinary prosperity. Never before in the history of 

 the world have so many first-class minds devoted their energies to its pro- 

 secution. Never before have brilliant discoveries followed in such rapid 

 succession. Natural Science has from the first befriended the cause of 

 humanity. By means of Science man has gained an empire over the 

 powers of Nature, and the emancipation of the human race from want and 

 suffering has been the result. The pursuit of Science in a free and disin- 

 terested manner, with the sole view of eliciting truth, has rewarded its 

 votaries with the meed of usefulness, besides the satisfaction of arriving 

 at truth. The illustrations of this are matters of daily occurrence. Few 

 persons who listened to the lectures of Tyndall on Sound, and saw his 

 minute and painstaking experiments, made with a view to discover the 

 rationale of the so-called "singing flames," would have expected that from 

 so whimsical an affair a useful invention would arise. Yet among the 

 most valuable applications of Science to the Arts recently made, is an 

 alarm-lamp which indicates to miners the presence of dangerous, inflam- 

 mable gases in the mine. The vibration of the flame, acted on through 

 wire gauze by the explosive gases, produces a sound varying in pitch and 

 intensity according to the height and calibre of the lamp-chimney. 



The cultivation of Science for itself, as Tyndall informed us, is the great 

 desideratum. No one can tell in advance which province of Science will 

 prove the most useful in application. Free, disinterested investigation of 

 Nature — the trivial manifestations of force as well as the most gigantic — is 

 the surest course to discover the truth, and it is also the method that will 

 prove the most useful to the well-being of man. 



But the fruits of Science in giving to man the direct mastery over Nature 

 are nowhere more desirable than to us who inhabit the valley of the Mis- 

 sissippi. What opportunities to study the laws of mineral formation has 

 the citizen of Missouri! What immediate fruits will reward the patient 

 enthusiasm of the investigator! How much does the improvement of the 

 Mississippi river to-day need the elaboration of a scientific theory respect- 

 ing the deposit of alluvium by river*! A careful induction based on long 

 and patient study of such deltas as those of the Ganges, the Nile, the 

 Danube, the Rhine, and the Mississippi, would be worth to our commerce 

 enough to pay for the endowment of all the scientific schools in this na- 

 tion. The famous Vauban pronounced the bars at the mouth of rivers 

 ** incorrigible." But a thorough knowledge of the laws which control the 

 transportation and deposition of the solid matter borne by these streams 

 to the sea, and the action of the tides and waves upon their currents at 



