14 
and indivisible. The National Academy of Sciences will, I 
feel sure, be now and hereafter another element of power to 
keep in their orbits, around the great central sun of the 
Union, this constellation of sovereign commonwealths. 
This act of incorporation may not be, is not, perfect. 
The task has been one of difficulty and delicacy. The 
number of members must be limited, while the most eminent 
men of science must be recognized, and sectional claims har- 
monized. If unintentional injustice has been done to any 
one, if mistakes have been made, time will, I trust, correct 
the injustice and the mistakes. Changes will surely come. 
“Death is in the world,” and this original list of honored 
names will not remain long unbroken. If men of merit have 
been forgotten in this act of incorporation, the Academy 
should seize the first and every occasion to right the seeming 
wrong. : 
This Academy is destined, I trust, to live as long as the 
republic shall endure, and to bear upon its rolls the names 
of the savans of coming generations. Let it then advance 
high its standard. Let it be as inflexible as justice, and as 
uncompromising as truth. Let it speak with the authority 
of knowledge, that pretension may shrink abashed before it, 
and merit everywhere turn to it confident of recognition. 
In the Providence of God, the Thirty-seventh Congress was 
summoned to the consideration of measures of transcendent 
magnitude. It enacted measures, empowering the govern- 
ment to raise hundreds of millions of dollars and millions of 
men, to protect the menaced life of the nation and preserve 
the vital spirit of freedom. It dealt with great questions of 
revenue and of finance. It obliterated an abhorrent system 
from the national capital, and engraved freedom upon every 
rood of the national territory. It consecrated the public 
domain to homesteads for the homeless and landless, and 
pee Oat eer — 
eee 
