418 
in the new gymnasium at the University. 
The members of the Association, faculties of 
the University, the Theological Seminary 
and the Mechanics’ Institute, members of 
the Academy of Science and of the Engi- 
neering Society, together with a number of 
guests assembled to listen to addresses by 
Professor J. B. Johnson, of the University 
of Wisconsin, and Dr. Robert H. Thurston, 
Director of Sibley College, Cornell Univer- 
sity. The former spoke on ‘ The Scientific 
Basis of Modern Industry.’ By modern in- 
dustry is meant the entire productive activ- 
ities of the machine-using nations. Since 
the introduction of the steam engine the 
world has made more progress than in all 
its former history. The steam engine does 
as much work in a year as all the men in 
the land could doinacentury. Without 
knowing the real essence of things—gravity, 
heat, light, electricity—we can know in 
some degree the laws of their action, and 
this knowledge is scientific. The effect of 
this knowledge has been to revolutionize 
industrial methods. Scientific education is 
to-day the foundation of all material pros- 
perity, hence industrial education on a 
scientific basis should receive the most lib- 
eralencouragement. Germany has been the 
first nation to recognize the importance of 
this work, and now the technical schools of 
that country are of the same educational 
rank as the great universities. The ap- 
plied scientist must be a specialist, and must 
be given facilities for investigation if dis- 
coveries are to be made which shall extend 
our knowledge of the forces of nature and 
adapt their actions to human needs. 
Dr. Thurston’s address was entitled ‘The 
Citizen, his Schools, his Industries, his 
Life.’ Dr. Thurston emphasized the in- 
creasing need of every citizen to be educated 
and to be aided by the State to secure and 
maintain the best possible position among 
his fellow men, for individual effort alone 
avails much less now than when competi- 
SCIENCE. 
[N. 8. Von. XIII. No. 324, 
tion was less severe. The material prog- 
ress of a nation may be measured by its con- 
sumption of iron and steel. A better gauge 
of advancement is the progress of higher 
education as supplementary to that of the 
common schools, particularly the develop- 
ment of the modern forms of technical 
school and the scientific departments of our | 
colleges and universities. A comparison 
of statistics shows that during the century 
just closed there was a parallel advance in 
the development of technical education, the 
growth of that product of industrial ac- 
tivity which represents permanent wealth, 
the increase of national wealth, both aggre- 
gate and per capita, and the wealth which 
is secured by the people as wages. The 
larger educational insitutions of this coun- 
try now graduate yearly about a thousand 
students trained in the applied sciences. 
‘The compulsion which has brought about 
this immense development of higher educa- 
tion has consisted of three main elements : 
(1) that ability attained, through increased 
and more widely and uniformly distributed 
wealth, on the part of the people, to secure 
higher education, which always marks such 
progress as we have traced in our material 
evolution; (2) that constantly growing de- 
mand for more generally learned men in 
the professions, including now the con- 
structive professions; (3) that constantly 
growing and increasingly intense demand, 
in all industrial vocations, for a scientific 
basis for all industries and for highly 
trained, learned men in all great enter- 
prises and in every system of industrial 
production. But all these elements of the 
aggregate compulsion rise out of and ac- 
company the evolution of the modern in- 
dustrial system, which, in turn, is based 
upon that progress in civilization through 
the work of the inventor, the mechanic 
and the man of science, which is giving us 
such marvelous accumulations of material 
wealth, with all its higher accompaniments 
