10 THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 



time to go on with theories and speculations more daring, 

 more hopeful, and more sacred, than have engaged former 

 ages — knowing that it is only out of the abstract, and out 

 of the recondite, and out of that which at first is apparently 

 true without being useful, that everything has been really educed 

 which the dry and dusty world now praises as practical. 

 A child's thoughtful play with the steam of a kettle, a boy's 

 dream about the fall of an apple, a man's tricks with a key and 

 a kite-string, are more than partially true parables of how elec- 

 tricity, and gravitation, and steam, came to take service in our 

 streets, and roads, and houses. And sanitary arts are yet in 

 their infancy, and disease and death ride in triumph through 

 our houses, only because ignorant selfishness will not hearken to 

 philosophy. But we are very anxious too, that all education, 

 even the most abstract, should have mingled with it some little 

 using of eyes and fingers — some intentional directed application 

 of sensations and volitions to the things which surround us ; 

 that powerful intellects, busy in the world of thought, should 

 not, as grand old Sedgwick used to say, "reel and stagger 

 through Grod's outer creation as if they were blind or drunk " 

 — without seeing it or feeling for it. 



I hope it is no lack of modesty to say, for I say it out of the 

 deeps of humility and veneration, that I believe few men can 

 have drunk intenser pleasure and exultation as boy and man 

 from the classical authors, or felt more passionately that they 

 yet store treasures of feeling and thought reserved for a worthier 

 age. But still, I believe, that very pleasure acd that very love of 

 their glories was not dulled but edged by the little I picked up 

 in laboratory or workshop ; by the Saturday afternoons of years 

 with the once famous Dr. Ick, in his "Natural Philosophy 

 Lectures," as they were then called, or the "Thursday Lectures" 

 which that scholar of scholars. Prince Lee, insisted that his Sixth 

 Form should thoroughly enter into through the midst of their 

 best scholarship work. 



It is not only that I am grateful for being made thus able to 

 comprehend some little of what I hear (though I hope trained 

 not to talk ultra crepidam), and to have more than a vague 

 reverence for the mysterious " riddle of this painful earth." I 

 feel and know that all the other work which I have ever been 



