APRIL 26, 1901. | 
deceitful devils, and the mandarin to-day, 
learned in all the ethical wisdom of Con- 
fucius, a classical scholar of the finest liter- 
ary taste, still burns his firecrackers at the 
funeral of a friend that he may frighten 
away the pestiferous spirits of evil which 
dog the steps of men through life even to 
the threshold of the world beyond. 
The rationalizing influence of science 
upon civilization needs no illustration to 
one versed in the literatures of the prescien- 
tific ages, to one who has read Plato’s 
‘“Timeens’ or Plutarch’s description of the 
moon. And how preposterous were the 
theories current but a century since, such 
as those which saw in fossils the freak of 
some plastic power in nature or the remains 
of a catastrophe which swept away in a 
flood of waters the very foundations of the 
earth. To-day how rare and how interest- 
ing are such survivals of this almost for- 
gotten time as the Atlantis of Ignatius 
Donnelly ! 
The theory of evolution furnishes one of 
the best examples of the replacement of the 
untruths of the past by truths discovered by 
science, and of their revolutionary effect. 
Since the discovery of the proofs of this 
process, man has come to know himself as 
never before. He understands at last the 
meaning of history and rewrites his texts 
on philology, literature and all social and 
political institutions. He sees, though as 
yet dimly, some solution to the ethical 
problems of sin and evil, and beholds as in 
a panorama the process of his creation. 
It is as yet too soon to see the full effect 
of these new conceptions upon the social 
mind. Science has not yet come toits own 
in education, and the irrational and the 
unreal are far from being wholly banished 
from society. But more and more the care 
of the young is entrusted to science to train, 
as none other can, to be quick of eye, true 
of speech, and rational in thought, to bring 
them face to face with reality and to open 
SCIENCE. 
653 
to their view the widest and most inspiring 
vistas. Common knowledge is one of the 
strongest social bonds. We meet and touch 
in what we know. The time has been when 
educated men drew together in a common 
knowledge of phrases written in extinct 
languages. To-day they find this rapproche- 
ment, this consciousness of kind, more and 
more in a common training in science. In 
the laboratory they have measured the 
energy of the falling body and studied its 
transformation into sound, heat, light, 
chemism and electricity ; they have tested 
the ray from the hydrogen atom and found 
its vibration the same from the flame on the 
table and in the light of Sirius. They have 
dissected the tissues of life, and have read 
in Nature’s book the life histories of moun- 
tain, river and planet. And thus to-day 
they have attained to that cosmic concep- 
tion, overwhelming in its sublimity, which 
is the best gift of science to man. 
The reward: which science asks for this 
service is the wages of going on; she asks 
for well-equipped laboratories, for longer 
courses of scientific study in schools, for 
the endowment of scientific instruction and 
research. Such foundations as the Law- 
rence Scientific School, the Field Columbian 
Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution 
are examples of appreciation as yet as rare 
as munificent. I am not aware of any such 
in Iowa. When wealth builds the spacious 
laboratory or endows a chair in science in 
any college of the commonwealth, it is but 
rendering to science herown. Each dollar 
earned by railway, telegraph and telephone, 
mine and quarry, mill and factory, farm 
and store, may well pay tithe to science 
which has made these industries possible. 
The gratitude for a life saved by the ap- 
plications of science in modern medicine 
might well be generous. And yet the total 
gifts to scientific instruction in Iowa by 
men of wealth do not exceed $50,000. I 
am aware of the State appropriations to the 
