SEPTEMBER 1, 1899. ] 
country can pay it. No organization ever 
visits an American city that has a better 
claim on the appreciation and respect of all 
its people. 
In the first place, you can hardly expect 
to entertain an organization of larger range, 
so far at least as its name is concerned. It 
is the American Association. It transcends 
not only all State limits, but national bound- 
aries as well. Anorganization that repre- 
sents the United States takes in a respect- 
able part of the land areas of the planet, 
but this is not merely a United States or- 
ganization. It especially includes that 
potent and ambitious neighbor of ours to 
the northward that owns more than three 
million square miles, or a full half, of the 
North American continent. The Associa- 
tion always counts with all confidence on 
its Canadian contingent. You can hear 
this afternoon an address from the honora- 
ble Canadian Vice-President of one of our 
sections, Mr. Whiteaves, of Ottawa. 
Our name is broad enough to include also 
our neighbors to the southward, Mexico and 
the Central American republics, but these 
countries have thus far devoted so much 
of their time and force to military science 
in the practical way that they have not had 
much enthusiasm left for the cultivation of 
the other branches of science in which our 
Association is especially interested. 
But there are American associations and 
American associations. They are not all 
alike. They are devoted to various in- 
terests. Some of them, in spite of the 
broad name they bear, have but a com- 
paratively narrow field. 
For example, there is an American Nu- 
mismatic Society, an American Stock- 
breeders’ Association, an American Straw- 
board Company, an American Detective 
Agency, etc., but this is the American As- 
sociation for the Advancement of Science. 
As I have said, no organization can well 
have a broader geographical name, and 
SCIENCE. 
269 
when we come to its subject-matter, the 
field in which it works, certainly no or- 
ganization can claim wider interest or 
greater importance. 
The American Association for the Ad- 
vancement of Science! Have you con- 
sidered what this name implies? We are 
coming to the close of the nineteenth 
century, which has been well styled. the 
century of science. 
Alfred R. Wallace has recently published 
a careful inventory of the discoveries and 
inventions to which the progress of the race 
is mainly due, and he divides them into ’ 
two groups, the first embracing all the 
epoch-making advances achieved by man 
previous to the present century, and the 
second taking in the discoveries and ad- 
vances of equal value that have had their 
origin in the nineteenth century. In the 
first list he finds but fifteen items of the 
highest rank, and the claims of some even 
of this number to a separate place are not 
beyond question. They may not really be 
of epoch-making character. But he puts 
into the list the following, viz : Alphabetic 
writing and the Arabic notation, which 
have always been the two great engines of 
knowledge and discovery. Their inventors 
are unknown, lost in the dim twilight of 
pre-historic times. Coming after a vast in- 
terval to the fourteenth century A. D. we 
find the mariner’s compass, and in the fif- 
teenth the printing press, both of which, 
beyond question, are of the same character 
and rank as alphabetic writing. From the 
sixteenth century we get no physical inven- 
tion or discovery, but it witnessed an amaz- 
ing movement of the human mind, which 
in good time gave rise to the great catalogue 
of advances of the seventeenth century, the 
most prolific of all the centuries antecedent 
to our own. ‘To it we credit the invention 
of the telescope and, though not of equal 
rank, the barometer and thermometer, and 
in still another field the invention of the 
