36 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XXIV. No. 602. 



much pleasure, on behalf of the university 

 under whose auspices you meet, to extend 

 a cordial welcome to the members of the 

 American Association for the Advancement 

 of Science, to the affiliated societies and to 

 the friends who accompany them here. We 

 feel it a great honor to have under our roof 

 so large a gathering of distinguished sci- 

 entists from all parts of the country. 



I notice that you have timed your meet- 

 ings so that you may be home by the Fourth 

 of July to properly celebrate that day. I 

 was thinking that if you practised on this 

 occasion the scientific habit of analysis, 

 and asked yourselves what was especially 

 worthy of celebration in the day, you would 

 perhaps sum it up under two or three heads. 

 One of them undoubtedly would be the fact 

 of a great nation of freemen governing 

 themselves. The second, I think, would be 

 the splendid mechanisms for the produc- 

 tion and transportation of economic com- 

 modities which this republic has developed 

 since the first Declaration of Independence. 

 And I think the third would be the unusu- 

 ally high level of material comfort which 

 the great majority of our population enjoy. 

 You see I have made a close connection 

 between the third of July and the fourth. 

 If I am right in the analysis I have made, 

 and have described correctly the three most 

 important thing-s that this republic has to 

 celebrate as each fourth of July returns, 

 v/e can recognize that two of them, at least, 

 are the results of the labors of scientists. 

 We can not, perhaps, attribute to scientists 

 a larger share than we attribute to other 

 citizens in the bringing out and maintain- 

 ing of a free government, but if we have 

 our splendid system of economic produc- 

 tion, and if the tide of material comfort 

 runs higher here than anywhere else on the 

 globe, it is due, first of all, to the abundant 

 resources of our country, and secondly to 

 the discoveries and investigations for which 

 scientific men are responsible. And when 



I say that scientific men have in this way 

 helped to produce two out of the three 

 most important things which characterize 

 our own republic, I do not feel that I have 

 exhausted their highest work, for science 

 has during the last hundred years revolu- 

 tionized the civilization of the world. It 

 has in other countries, as in our own, in- 

 creased material comforts, multiplied in- 

 ventions and extended knowledge. It has 

 introduced new modes of thought and new 

 standards of evidence. The civilization of 

 the earlier centuries was colored and mold- 

 ed by hearsay and tradition, whereas one 

 of the most splendid achievements that 

 has come to our age through the advance 

 of science is the resting of knowledge on 

 evidence, and on theory and hypothesis 

 only as they are maintained by it. No one 

 who has studied the thought and considered 

 the progress of the world in its highest 

 spiritual aspects can feel that I have stated 

 the fact too strongly in saying that science 

 has revolutionized the civilization of the 

 past— first of all, that of Europe and of 

 America, and later that of Asia also. 



So, ladies and gentlemen, we at Cornell 

 University feel it a great honor to have in 

 our midst for a number of days the repre- 

 sentatives of those men and women who by 

 the achievements of their labors and intel- 

 lects are really shaping the advance of 

 nations and molding the civilization of 

 mankind. I am not certain that we can 

 adequately show you the honor which we 

 feel. We labor under a certain disadvan- 

 tage, for it is now vacation and many mem- 

 bers of our faculty have left their homes, 

 but what it was in our power to do we have 

 done. We have placed the facilities of the 

 university here freely at your disposal. 

 Ithaca is not as well provided with hotels 

 as some of the larger cities, and so to sup- 

 plement our local resources in that regard 

 we have opened Sage College, and the 

 graduates and undergraduates who control 



