550 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. L. No. 1303 



to voyage on and try the hazard of new 

 fortimes. It is to men like these that we owe 

 the opening of new regions to settlement. In 

 them through all ages has spoken the soul of 

 Odysseus : 



Push, off, and sitting well in order, smite 

 The sounding furrows, for my purpose holds 

 So sail beyond the sunset and the baths 

 Of all the wesitern stars, until I die. 



The world, however, has passed through 

 this epoch. 'No new lands lie under the sun 

 waiting discovery, for the earth's surface, in 

 all its essentials is roughly known. The 

 home of El Dorado, the Fountain of Per- 

 petual Youth, the Seven Cities of Cibola, 

 Bagdad, the Land of Ophir, Cipangu, Lhassa, 

 the country of Prester John and the city of 

 the Great Khan, like the Poles of the Earth 

 and the " Old Moon Mountains African," — 

 all these have faded out of the romanticism 

 of twilight obscurity into the daylight monot- 

 ony of the commonplace. Magical names 

 that once lured mankind, have vanished like 

 the Wagnerian gods, over some rainbow 

 bridge into the Valhalla of their own 

 romance. 



We will do well to pause for a moment to 

 contrast the modern movement that is en- 

 meshing the earth in a net of industrial 

 enterprises, with the spirit of the Age of 

 Discovery just closing, that we may better 

 orient educational work with respect to future 

 necessities and present demands. Especially 

 is this required of the sciences, upon the 

 development of which industry depends. In 

 the iield of biology, the extent to which 

 botany becomes an effective factor in modern 

 education, depends very largely at the present 

 time, whether we will it so or not, upon the 

 degree to which it can be brought to effi- 

 ciently cooperate in practical affairs. 



For our greater and our lesser happiness, 

 the boyhood of the human race is past. We 

 are growing up socially and economically, and 

 the inevitable outcome is going to be the 

 mastery of the globe by means and for ends 

 that are scientifically economic, and in the 

 long run unquestionably altruistic. If this de- 

 velopment means the elimination of mystery 

 and glamor so far as the earth's surface is 



concerned, it yet remains for biologists to 

 exploit the deeper mystery and the more thril- 

 ling story of life itself in all its protean 

 forms upon that surface. If this' transforma- 

 tion means the elimination of the poetry of 

 the naive childhood of the race, we may yet, 

 perchance, find a higher poetry in the grander 

 rhythm of a developing social life and a more 

 harmonious evolution of wider racial ideals. 

 Such at least are the deeper reflections of 

 science — science that has come both to destroy 

 and to fulfill. 



In no other field of industry is the scientific 

 age working greater changes than in agri- 

 culture. The eldest, the most primitive and 

 the most necessary of occupations, agriciil- 

 ture, has been, until the last centruy, the field 

 most neglected by science. In the older 

 countries of Europe, a sharp social stratifica- 

 tion, involving contempt for manual labor 

 among the so-called upper classes, has been 

 one of the retarding factors in agricultiiral 

 development. Agriculture there is still largely 

 the occupation of the peasant, and for the 

 most part, the university and the peasant 

 never meet. While this is rather a bald and 

 radical statement of the situation, it holds 

 good in its general outlines for most of the 

 European states operating under the aristo- 

 cratic systems of the past, while in the rest, 

 the prejudice referred to still survives as a 

 social memory. 



In our own country, settled at the outset by 

 immigrants who chiefly came from a body of 

 land-loving and free-holding people, social 

 prejudice toward agriculture is a compara- 

 tively minor matter, economically speaking. 

 Strange to say, however, the very favoring 

 conditions of our environment have hindered 

 agricultural development along scientific lines. 

 Our land was originally boundless and seem- 

 ingly inexhaustible. It was impossible not 

 to make a living on a farm, and anybody 

 could become the possessor of one. There 

 were no agricultural economic problems to 

 solve, beyond the question of markets for the 

 surplusage of the farm. What wonder that 

 agriculture awakened scant interest in the 

 scientific world. If the soil began to yield 

 less as the years went by, under a wasteful. 



