222 BULLETIN OF THE 



edge have been trained to be reflective and cautious against the 

 enticements of error. I never knew a man who strove more ear- 

 nestly than Henry to make this just election between right and 

 wrong, between truth and error, or who was better equipped 

 with a native faculty for making the vv^ise choice between them. 

 He had brought his whole nature under the dominion of truth- 

 fulness. 



But while thus eager and honest in the pursuit of truth he had 

 nothing controversial in his temper. It was a favorite doctrine of 

 his that error of opinion could be most successfully combated, not 

 by the negative processes of direct attack, rousing the pride and 

 provoking the contumacy of its adherents, but rather by the affirm- 

 ative process of teaching, in meekness and love, the truth that is 

 naturally antagonistic to it. The King of Sweden and Norway 

 made him a Knight of St. Olaf, but St. Olaf's thunderous way 

 of prcpagating Christianity — by battering down the idols of Nor- 

 way with Thor's own hammer — is not the way that his American 

 votary would have selected. There was nothing iconoclastic in 

 Henry's zeal for truth. He believed that there is in all truth a 

 self-evidencing quality, and a redemptive power which makes it 

 at once a potent and a remedial force in the world. Hence he 

 never descended to any of those controversies which, in the an- 

 nals of science, have sometimes made the odium scientificwn a 

 species of hatred quite as distinct, and quite as lively, too, as 

 its more ancient congener, the odium theologicum. When once 

 it was sought to force a controversy of this kind upon him, and 

 when accusations were made which seemed to aflfect his personal 

 honor, as well as the genuineness of his scientific claims, he re- 

 ferred the matter for adjudication to the Regents of the Smith- 

 sonian. Their investigation and their report dispensed him from 

 the necessity of self-defence. The simple truth was his sufficient 

 buckler. And this equanimity was not simply the result of tem- 

 perament. It sprang from the largeness of his mind, as well as 

 from the serious view he took of life and duty. He was able to 

 moderate his own opinions, because, in the amplitude of his intel- 

 lectual powers, he was able to be a moderator of opinions in the 

 scientific world. You all know with what felicity and intellectual 

 sympathy he presided over the deliberations of this Society, com- 

 posed as it is of independent scientific workers in almost every 

 department of modern research. Alike in the judicial temper of 



