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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXIII. No. 843 



your achievement unrecognized by the 

 doctor of medicine who acquired his degree 

 by a three or possibly four years course in 

 some medical school only possibly of re- 

 spectable grade. In the community, out- 

 side of the university circle, you will be 

 addressed by them as Mister, preferably 

 as Professor, and if the latter, with appar- 

 ently no other distinction in mind than 

 that you are of a peculiar social genus 

 which for convenience and to avoid in- 

 fringement of copyright is so designated 

 and with broad enough application to em- 

 brace with you the dancing master, the 

 friseur and the artist in fistics. It is per- 

 haps reasonably true that in any com- 

 munity deprived of the academic atmos- 

 phere, that is in the average American 

 community, there is among practitioners 

 of medicine and surgery an indifference to 

 or failure to grasp the purport of pure 

 biologic research, so complete and dense as 

 to be appalling, the more as it lies in a 

 quarter where one might most reasonably 

 hope for support and sympathetic con- 

 cern. Compared with the intelligent man- 

 ufacturer, the wholesale merchant, the 

 banker, the stock broker, the modern 

 farmer, the average physician or surgeon 

 carries toward the ideals of our science 

 and of geologic science as well, so far as the 

 results involved are not strictly commer- 

 cial, an air of indifference that partakes of 

 the supercilious. 



These are the chief elements in our 

 human atmosphere with which the work of 

 some of us must most often come into close 

 contact. As for the two influential classes 

 — the clergy and the teachers — taken to- 

 gether as one class, the educators, it must 

 be said that the reacting influence upon 

 pure science is least of all. Either they 

 lead where the student of biologic science 

 can not follow or they follow where the 

 biologist leads. 



At the opening meeting of this society a 

 year ago an effort was made to present as 

 an introductory to our work the broader 

 bearings of paleontologic science in a form 

 which might be read and understood of all 

 men. It was thought, and wisely, I believe, 

 that in this way the society might declare 

 at the outset a platform of helpfulness to 

 the advance of human knowledge and thus 

 to the progress of culture. Those of us 

 who were privileged to listen to this con- 

 course of authoritative expression on the 

 achievements and potentialities of the sci- 

 ence must have felt that such a summa- 

 tion of its purport was needed. I believe 

 this society, now in its inception, would do 

 well to keep before its eyes as the real 

 objective of its existence, the fact that it 

 must make itself immediately contributory 

 to human culture and popular instruction 

 if it is to achieve a worthy existence. In 

 our varied special interests we are some- 

 what forced to overlook these broader and 

 perhaps more humane applications in the 

 conviction that our work is its own justifi- 

 cation, no matter how constrained its 

 boundaries. It is even so, but it was also 

 a singular commentary I fear on the men- 

 tal attitude of some of us toward what is 

 really the supreme objective of our work 

 that the council of this society decided not 

 to publish this series of illuminating papers 

 on the aspects of paleontology — and all 

 the more a matter for congratulation that 

 my successor to this office assured their 

 publication in a magazine of wider and 

 more popular circulation than the bulletin 

 of the society.^ 



Rarely has there been given in any one 

 place as satisfactory a summary of the 

 philosophy and achievement of this sei- 



^The papers delivered at the Conference on the 

 Aspects of Paleontology at the first (Cambridge) 

 meeting of the society have appeared in various 

 numbers of The Popular Science Monthly for 

 1910. 



