86 ASPECTS OP AMERICAN ASTRONOMY. 



great a distance to take part in the inauguration tlie fact has at the 

 moment escaijed my mind. 



That the interest thus shown is not confined to the hundreds of 

 attendants, but must be shared by your great public, is shown by the 

 unfailing barometer of journalism. Here we have a field in which the 

 nonsurvival 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 count- 

 less 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 accom- 

 plished by an enterprise in making known everything that occurred, 

 and, in case of an emergency requiring a heroic measure, what did not 

 occur, showing that smart journalists of the East must have learned 

 their trade, or at least breathed their inspiration, 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 journalistic enterprise has been in the reverse 

 direction to that of the course of empire, eastward instead of westward. 



It has been sometimes said — wrongfully, 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 organized 

 such a society and forthwith proceeded to business. This feature con- 

 sisted in the conferences on almost every branch of astronomy by 

 which the celebration of yesterday was preceded. The fact that beyond 

 the acceptance of a graceful compliment I contributed nothing to these 

 conferences relieves 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 astrono- 

 mers. All the experience of the past leads us to believe 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 x>i"esent week. Each astronomer may know by publications per- 

 taining 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 Europe, 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 

 results; that however little they may have actually to learn of methods 

 and results, they will feel stimulated to well-directed efforts and find 



