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SCIENCE 



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



of the two associations. It is undoubtedly 

 true that each of these men had achieved un- 

 usual prominence in scientific work at the 

 time he became president of the one or the 

 other of the two great associations. An anal- 

 ysis of the careers of each one of them is 

 not possible at the present time, nor is it 

 possible to indicate whether his address was 

 delivered at the crowning period of his pro- 

 ductive scientific life. With some of them 

 it was, with others it was not. As a matter 

 of fact, however, the average age of the presi- 

 dents of the British Association was sixty- 

 one years and eleven months, and with the 

 American Association it was sixty-one years 

 and five months. The youngest president of 

 the British Association during the period 

 imder consideration was fifty-three years of 

 age. This held for Professor Rucker, Sir 

 J. J. Thomson, and Professor Bateson. The 

 oldest of them was Professor Bonney, whose 

 address was delivered at the age of seventy- 

 seven.. The youngest of the American presi- 

 dents were Minot and Richards, whose ad- 

 dresses were delivered at the age of fifty; 

 and the oldest was Eliot, whose Philadelphia 

 address was delivered when he was seventy- 

 nine years old. I remember that Dr. Eliot 

 hesitated to accept the presidency on the 

 ground that he might not live another year 

 to deliver his address. That was eight years 

 ago and he is still living and writing at the 

 age of eighty-seven. 



One is strongly tempted at this point to 

 enter briefly upon a discussion as to the 

 average length of the productive life of a 

 scientific man and as to the average period 

 of its practical end. But the semi-humor- 

 ous and totally misunderstood remark by Sir 

 "William Osier at his farewell address at 

 Johns Hopkins in 1904 has been so volumi- 

 nously criticized and has caused so much sor- 

 row, or so much indignation as the case may 

 be, to still productive men away past their 

 early forties, and the side of the veterans has 

 been so triumphantly defended, that further 

 argument and illusti-ation are unnecessary. 

 We may safely assume, in fact, that the use- 

 fulness of the man past middle age is granted. 



and that, while he may not have the illu- 

 minative bursts of inventive or speculative 

 genius which come to the younger man, he 

 is better able to make the broad generaliza- 

 tions based upon accumulated experience — 

 in other words, to prepare an appropriate 

 presidential address as president of the Brit- 

 ish or the American Association for the Ad- 

 vancement of Science! 



But so far I have only skirted a promising 

 field. I have an idea that some one should 

 go deeply into the subject, not only of presi- 

 dential addresses before the British and 

 American Associations, but of all president- 

 ial addresses. Why do we have such addres- 

 ses? If there is a good reason — and there 

 probably is — why do not people read them? 

 Or does some one read them? And if so, 

 who? and why? Some presidents prepare 

 addresses which they hope will interest the 

 people who come to listen to them. Others 

 are perfectly indifferent to their listeners, 

 and perfunctorily read addresses intended for 

 later severely restricted groups of readers, 

 such as the professional astronomers of the 

 world, as Harkness did, for example, in 1893 

 at Madison. A host of ideas occur to me 

 that suggest promising lines of investigation, 

 but I leave their elaboration to some one of 

 my successors who may like the task and 

 who may be a psychologist fitted by training 

 to deal with it. 



THE WAR AGAINST THE INSECTS 



Count Korzybski, in his recent remarkable 

 book " The Manhood of Humanity," gives a 

 new definition of man, departing from the 

 purely biological concept on the one hand 

 and from the mythological-biological-philo- 

 sophical idea on the other, and concludes' that 

 humanity is set apart from other things that 

 exist on this globe by its time-hinding faculty, 

 or power or capacity. This is another way 

 of saying that man preserves the history of 

 the race and should be able to profit by a 

 knowledge of the past in order to improve the 

 future. It is indeed this time-'binding ca- 

 pacity which is the principal asset of hu- 

 manity, and this alone would make the 



