ANNUAL ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. xXLI 
on the services one may have rendered, on cleverness, judgments 
strength, or official position, and to feel secure in these, is to court 
the fate of the clam. 
There are not very many men of science, and there are no satis- 
factory means of increasing the number; it is just as useless to ex- 
hort men to love science, or to sneer at them because they do not, 
as it is to advise them to be six feet three inches high or to condemn 
a man because his hair is not red. 
While the ideal man of science must have a “clear, cold, keen 
intellect, as inevitable and as merciless in its conclusions as a logic 
engine,” it would seem that, in the opinion of some, his greatness 
and superiority consists not so much in the amount of knowledge 
he possesses, or in what he does with it, as in the intensity and 
purity of his desire for knowledge. 
This so-called thirst for knowledge must be closely analogous to 
an instinctive desire for exercise of an organ or faculty, such as 
that which leads a rat to gnaw, or a man of fine physique to delight 
in exercise. Such instincts should not be neglected. If the rat 
does not gnaw, his teeth will become inconvenient or injurious to 
himself, but it is not clear that he deserves any special eulogium 
merely because he gnaws. 
It will be observed that the definition of a scientific man or 
man of science, says nothing about his manners or morals. We 
may infer that-a man devoted to science would have neither time 
nor inclination for dissipation or vice; that he would be virtuous 
either because of being passionless or because of his clear foresight 
of the consequences of yielding to temptation. 
My own experience, however, would indicate that either this 
inference is not correct or that some supposed scientific men have 
been wrongly classified as such. How far the possession of a scien- 
tific mind and of scientific knowledge compensates, or atones for, 
ill-breeding or immorality, for surliness, vanity, and petty jealousy, 
for neglect of wife or children, for uncleanliness, physical and 
mental, is a question which can only be answered in each individual 
case; but the mere fact that a man desires knowledge for its own 
sake appears to me to have little to do with such questions. I 
would prefer to know whether the man’s knowledge and work is of 
any use to his fellow-men, whether he is the cause of some happiness 
in others which would not exist without him. And it may be noted 
that while utility is of small account in the eyes of some eulogist, 
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