642 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LIV. No. 1409. 



tlie American Association that did not deserve 

 serious reading and study. 



For twenty-three years, year after year, I 

 have sat on the platform near the president of 

 the American Association for the Advance- 

 ment of Science during the delivery of his 

 address, until I may justly claim to be an ex- 

 pert on presidential addresses, in much the 

 same way that the leader of a hotel-orchestra 

 can claim to be an expert on after-dinner 

 speeches — because he has heard so many ! 



At all events, the twenty-two and more ad- 

 dresses of this character which I have heard, 

 and the one hundred others wMch I have read, 

 have given me the idea that it would not be 

 amiss to deliver a presidential address on the 

 subject of presidential addresses. I have been 

 Tather pleased with this idea, and will in fact 

 ■elaborate it before I take my seat. 



J3ut there are other ideas that have been 

 almost equally insistent and which fit rather 

 more closely to the average notion of propriety 

 for so important an address as this theoreti- 

 cally should be. One of them is a consideration 

 of what seem to me to be educational falla- 

 cies in the teaching of science to-day, and espe- 

 cially of the biological sciences. But I am 

 modest, and I am ignorant. I have never been a 

 teacher, and, in order to discuss this vital ques- 

 tion in any but a perfectly one-sided way, one 

 must know intimately the viewpoint and the 

 ultimate aim of those who control the teach- 

 ing, especially of the biological sciences, in our 

 great laboratories. I should visit the work 

 shops at Harvard and Yale, at Columbia, at 

 the University of Pennsylvania, at Johns Hop- 

 kins, at the University of Chicago, or here, at 

 Toronto, and talk at length with the men in 

 charge; and then I should go to Woods Hole 

 in the summer, where the teachers themselves 

 go to study and to be taught, and should do my 

 utmost to convince myself that they are right 

 in ignoring most practical problems and are 

 justified in spending their lives on the search 

 for fundamental principles and, what is more 

 to the point, teaching little but facts and 

 methods relating to their own studies and to 

 the studies of their school. I have no time for 

 this, and so can not enter fairly into the subject. 



As I am writing this (July 29), I see that 

 Sir Edward Thorpe has announced as the sub- 

 ject of his address before the British Associa- 

 tion at Edinburgh " The Aspects and Problems 

 of Post- War Science, Pure and Applied." It 

 was the war that helped make me more dissatis- 

 fied than ever with the results of biological 

 teaching in America, just as it has been the 

 war that has caused the British people to dis- 

 trust their whole educational system. With us 

 in Washington, the teachers from the principal 

 universities were brought together, and a 

 iN'ational Research Council was formed. The 

 results of the work of this organization in the 

 direction of biology and agriculture, so far as 

 they applied to the prosecution of the war, 

 were largely negative ; but that much good will 

 result to the country by the bringing of these 

 men to Washington in the great emergency 

 there can be little doubt, since I have the hope 

 that it opened their eyes to the fact that their 

 university work might have been of much 

 greater value to their country, and to the 

 further fact perhaps that there exist under the 

 federal government agencies which are work- 

 ing upon biological problems effectively and 

 with the highest attention to scientific methods 

 and scientific ideas. 



Laying aside then this idea of an educational 

 discussion, the idea that is always with me, 

 of once more considering what Sir Harry 

 Johnston has with his usual felicity called " the 

 next great world war " — the war of humanity 

 against the class Insecta — has still further im- 

 pressed itself upon me. And so there are two 

 topics which I shall briefly discuss — first, presi- 

 dential addresses, and, second, our struggle 

 against insects. 



ON SOME PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES 



Let us hurriedly glance at the presidential 

 addresses delivered before the British and the 

 American Associations from 1895 down to last 

 year, 1920, and at the men who delivered them. 

 During that period there were 27 such addresses 

 before the American Association and 24 before 

 the British Association, the discrepancy being 

 due to the omission of the 1917 meeting of the 



