710 
of a towering snow peak is none the less im- 
pressive because you have learned in your 
geography how many feet high it is, and 
great acts are none the less admirable be- 
cause they correspond to what you have 
heard and read, and might therefore be led 
to expect. 
The next gratifying feature is the great 
public interest excited by the occasion. 
That the opening of a purely scientific in- 
stitution should have led so large an assem- 
blage of citizens to devote an entire 
day, including a long journey by rail, to 
the celebration of yesterday is something 
most suggestive from its unfamiliarity. A 
great many scientific establishments have 
been inaugurated during the last half cen- 
tury, but if on any such occasion so large a 
body of citizens has gone so great a dis- 
tance to take part in the inauguration the 
fact has at the moment escaped from my 
mind. 
That the interest thus shown is not~con- 
fined to the hundreds of attendants, but 
must be shared by your great public, is 
shown by the unfailing barometer of jour- 
nalism. Here we have a field in which the 
non-survival of the unfit is the rule in its 
most ruthless form; the journals that we 
see and read are merely the fortunate few 
of a countless number, dead and forgotten, 
that did not know what the public wanted 
to read about. The eagerness shown by the 
representatives of your press in recording 
everything your guests would say was 
accomplished by an enterprise in making 
known everything that occurred, and, in 
case of an emergency requiring a heroic 
measure, what did not occur, which shows 
that smart journalists of the East must 
have learned their trade, or at least 
breathed their inspirations in these regions. 
I think it was some twenty years since I 
told a European friend that the eighth 
wonder of the world was a Chicago daily 
newspaper. Since that time the course of 
SCIENCE, 
LN. S. Vou. VI. No. 150. 
journalistic enterprise has been in the re- 
verse direction, to that of the course of em- 
pire eastward, instead of westward. 
It has been sometimes said—wrong- 
fully I think—that scientific men form a 
mutual admiration society. One feature of 
the occasion made me feel that we, your 
guests, ought then and there to have organ- 
ized such a society, and forthwith pro- 
ceeded to business ; this feature consisted in 
the conferences on almost every branch of 
astronomy by which the celebration of yes- 
terday was preceded. The fact that beyond 
the acceptance of a graceful compliment I 
contributed nothing to these conferences re- 
lieves me from the charge of bias or self- 
assertion in saying that they gave me a 
new and most inspiring view of the energy 
now being expended in research by the 
younger generation of astronomers. All 
the experience of the past leads us to be- 
lieve that this energy will reap the reward 
which Nature always bestows upon those 
who seek her acquaintance from unselfish 
motives. In one way it might appear that 
little was to be learned from a meeting like 
that of the present week ; each astronomer 
may know by publications pertaining to the 
science what all the others are doing. But 
knowledge obtained in this way has a sort 
of abstractness about it, a little like our 
knowledge of the progress of civilization 
in Japan, or of the great extent of the 
Australian continent. It was, therefore, a 
most happy thought on the part of your 
authorities to bring together the largest 
possible number of visiting astronomers 
from Hurope as well as America, in order 
that each might see, through the attrition 
of personal contact, what progress the 
others were making in their researches. 
To the visitors, at least, I am sure that the 
result of this meeting has been extremely 
gratifying. They earnestly hope, one and 
all, that the callers of the conference will 
not themselves be more disappointed in its 
