THE DEBT OF THE WORLD TO PURE SCIEI^OE. 



By John J. Stevenson, 



The fundamental importance of abstruse research receives too little 

 consideration in our time. The practical side of life is all absorbent; 

 the results of research are utilized promptly, and full recognition is 

 awarded to the one who utilizes while the investigator is ignored. The 

 student himself is liable to be regarded as a relic of media?val times, 

 and his unconcern respecting ordinary matters is serviceable to the 

 dramatist and newspaper witlet in their times of need. 



Yet ev^ery thoughtful man, far away as his calling may be from 

 scientific investigation, hesitates to accept such judgment as accurate. 

 Not a few, engrossed in the strife of the market place, are convinced 

 that, even from the seltisli standpoint of mere enjoyment, less gain is 

 found in amassing fortunes or in acquiring power over one's fellows 

 than in the effort to solve nature's problems. Men scoff at philosoph- 

 ical dreamers, but the scoffing is not according to knowledge. The 

 exigencies of subjective philosophy brought about the objective phil- 

 osophy. Error has led to the right. Alchemy prepared the way for 

 chemistry ; astrology for astronomy ; cosmogony for geology. The birth 

 of inductive science was due to the necessities of deductive science, 

 and the greatest development of the former has come from the trial of 

 hypotheses belonging in the borderland between science and philosophy. 



My effort this evening is to show that discoveries, which have proved 

 all important in secondary results, did not burst forth full grown; that 

 in each case they were, so to say, the crown of a structure reared pain- 

 fully and noiselessly by men indifferent to this world's affairs, caring 

 little for fame and even less for wealth. Facts were gathered, prin- 

 ciples were discovered, each falling into its own place until at last the 

 brilliant crown shown out and the world thought it saw a miracle. 



This done, 1 shall endeavor to draw a moral, which it is hoped will 

 be found worthy of consideration. 



The heavenly bodies were objects of adoration from the earliest 

 antiquity; they were guides to caravans on the desert as well as to 

 mariners far from land; they marked the beginning of seasons, or, as 



' Presidential address delivered at the annual meeting of the New York Academy 

 of Sciences, February 28, 1898. Printed in Science, March 11, 1898. 



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