908 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. IV. No. 103. 



it must compare the processes of growth, 

 and these can be discovered by means of 

 studies of the cultures of small geographi- 

 cal areas. 



Thus we have seen that the comparative 

 method can hope to reach the grand results 

 for which it is striving only when it bases 

 its investigafeions on the historical results 

 of researches which are devoted to laying 

 clear the complex relations of each indi- 

 vidual culture. The comparative method 

 and the historical method, if I may use 

 these terms, have been struggling for 

 supremacy for a long time, but we may 

 hope that each will soon find its appropriate 

 place and function. The historical method 

 has reached a sounder basis by abandoning 

 the misleading principle of assuming con- 

 nections wherever similarities of culture 

 were found. The comparative method, 

 notwithstanding all that has been said and 

 written in its praise, has been remarkably 

 barren of definite results, and I believe it 

 will not become fruitful until we renounce 

 the vain endeavor to construct a uniform sys- 

 tematic history of the evolution of culture, 

 and until we begin to make our compari- 

 sons on the broader and sounder basis which 

 I ventured to outline. Up to this time we 

 have too much reveled in more or less in- 

 genious vagaries. The solid work is still 

 all before us. Franz Boas. 



PRINCETON IN THE NATION'S SERVICE* 

 It used to be taken for granted — did it 

 not ? — that colleges would be found always 

 on the conservative side in politics (except 

 on the question of free trade) ; but in this 

 latter day a great deal has taken place 

 which goes far toward discrediting the pre- 

 sumption. The college in our day lies very 

 near, indeed, to the affairs of the world. It 

 is a place of the latest experiments; its 



* Concluding part of Prof. Woodrow Wilson's 

 •oration at the Princeton Sesquicentennial Exercises. 

 Eeprinted from The Forum for December, 1896. 



laboratories are brisk with the spirit of dis- 

 covery ; its lecture rooms resound with the 

 discussion of new theories of life and novel 

 programmes of reform. There is no radical 

 like your learned radical, bred in the 

 schools; and thoughts of revolution have 

 in our time been harbored in universities 

 as naturally as they were once nourished 

 among the Encyclopedists. It is the scien- 

 tific spirit of the age which has wrought 

 the change. I stand with my hat off at 

 very mention of the great men who have 

 made our age an age of knowledge. No 

 man more heartily admires, more gladly 

 welcomes, more approvingly reckons the 

 gain and the enlightenment that have come 

 to the world through the extraordinary ad- 

 vances in physical science which this great 

 age has witnessed. He would be a barba- 

 rian and a lover of darkness who should 

 grudge that great study any part of its tri- 

 umph. But I am a student of society and 

 should deem myself unworthy of the 

 comradeship of great men of science should 

 I not speak the plain truth with regard to 

 what I see happening under my own eyes. 

 I have no laboratory but the world of books 

 and men in which I live ; but I am much 

 mistaken if the scientific spirit of the age 

 is not doing us a great disservice, working 

 in us a certain great degeneracy. Science 

 has bred in us a spirit of experiment and 

 a contempt for the past. It has made us 

 credulous of quick improvement, hopeful of 

 discovering panaceas, confident of success 

 in every new thing. 



I wish to be as explicit as carefully 

 chosen words will enable me to be upon a 

 matter so critical, so radical as this. I 

 have no indictment against what science 

 has done : I have only a warning to utter 

 against the atmosphere which has stolen 

 from laboratories into lecture rooms and 

 into the general air of the world at large. 

 Science — our science — is new. It is a child 

 of the ninteenth century. It has trans- 



