644 
emy; Professer Ira Remsen, Baltimore, 
Md., foreign secretary ; Mr. Arnold Hague, 
Washington, D. C., home secretary—each 
for a term of six years. The following 
were elected additional members of the 
council for the ensuing year: J.S. Billings, 
G. J. Brush, H. P. Bowditch, Arnold 
Hague, Simon Newcomb, L. P. Langley. 
Five new members were elected as fol- 
lows: 
George F. Becker, U.S. Geological Survey, Wash- 
ington, D. C. 
J. McKeen Cattell, Professor of Psychology, Co- 
lumbia University, New York City. 
Eliakim H. Moore, Professor of Mathematics, Uni- 
versity of Chicago, Chicago, Ill. 
Edward L. Nichols, Professor of Physics, Cornell 
University, Ithaca, N. Y. 
T. Mitchell Prudden, Professor of Pathology, Col- 
lege of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia Univer- 
sity. 
The following were elected foreign asso- 
ciates : 
J. Janssen, Director of the Observatoire d’ Astron- 
omie Physique, Meudon, France. 
Mr. Loewy, Director of the Observatoire de Paris, 
Paris. 
E. Bornet, of the Section of Botany of the Paris 
Academy of Sciences. 
Hugo Kronecker, Professor of Physiology in the 
University of Bern. 
A. Cornu, Professor of Physics, Ecole polytech- 
nique, Paris. 
F. Kohlrausch, Professor of Physics at the Univer- 
sity of Berlin. 
Sir Archibald Geikie, recently Director of the Geo- 
logical Survey of Great Britain. 
J. H. van’t Hoff, Professor of Chemistry in the 
University of Berlin. 
The Henry Draper medal was awarded 
to Sir William Huggins, of London, for his- 
investigations in astronomical physics. 
THE SOCIAL SERVICE OF SCIENCE.* 
Tue extent to which society may be con- 
sidered as an organism is still, | understand, 
a matter of controversy with sociologists, 
but without awaiting its adjudication, we 
*Address of the retiring President, Iowa Academy 
of Science. Des Moines, December 26, 1900. 
SCLENCE. 
[N. S. Von. XIII. No. 330. 
may surely make use of a simile as ancient 
as that of the Apostle who spoke of in- 
dividual Christians as members of one body, 
or as that of the wise old Roman who 
taught the mutinous plebs the parable of 
the body politic, all of whose members were 
nourished by the well-fed patrician belly, 
and consider together this evening the 
special function of science in the body social. 
It may at least supply a conyenient 
means of classifying the various services of 
science to the common weal, if we con- 
sider it not as a distinct corporal mem- 
ber, but rather as a growth force, ever 
accelerating the evolution of society, pro- 
viding it with organs of defense, increasing 
its muscular energy, and perfecting its 
systems of circulation and communication. 
And if to these services we add the reaction 
upon the social mind of the physical 
environment which science has provided, 
and the direct influence of scientific truth, 
we shall then have sketched at least the 
main functions of science in social evolution. 
Among the first services to society which 
our biologic analogues suggest is that of 
defense. Under the growth force of science 
the body social has accomplished an evyo- 
lution similar to that which brought the 
vertebrates, assumed to have been at first 
naked and defenseless, to the stage of the 
armored fishes of the Devonian, and which 
in the Tertiary changed tooth to tusk, nail 
to claw, and frontal boss to horn and antler. 
Prescientific society was destroyed large- 
ly because it had attained no adequate 
means of defense. It is safe to say that 
had the Roman Jegionaries been equipped 
with Maxims and Mausers, the episode of 
the Hun and Vandal invasions of Southern 
Europe would have been indefinitely post- 
poned. 
Modern society, which science has armed 
with the most terrible of death-dealing 
weapons, whose explosives are brought from 
the laboratory of the chemist, whose im- 
