394 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XX. No. 508. 



into specialties, many of which are becom- 

 ing so minute and so isolated that they 

 seem to have no interest to any but their 

 few pursuers. Happily, science itself has 

 afforded a corrective for its own tendency 

 in this direction. The careful thinker 

 will see that in these seemingly diverging 

 branches common elements and common 

 principles are coming more and more to 

 light. There is an increasing recognition 

 of methods of research and of deduction 

 which are common to large branches or to 

 the whole of science. We are more and 

 more recognizing the principle that prog- 

 ress in knowledge implies its reduction to 

 a more exact form, and the expression of 

 its ideas in language more or less mathe- 

 matical. The problem before the organ- 

 izers of this congress was, therefore, to 

 bring the sciences together, and seek for 

 the imity which we believe underlies their 

 infinite diversity. The assembling of such 

 a body as now fills this hall was scarcely 

 possible in any preceding generation, and 

 is made possible now only through the 

 agency of science itself. It differs from all 

 preceding international meetings by the 

 universality of its scope, which aims to in- 

 clude the whole of knowledge. It is also 

 unique in that none but leaders have been 

 sought out as members. It is unique in 

 that so many lands have delegated their 

 choicest intellects to carry on its work. 

 They come from the country to which our 

 republic is indebted for a third of its terri- 

 tory, including the ground on which we 

 stand; from the land which has taught us 

 that the most scholarly devotion to the 

 languages and learning of the cloistered 

 past is compatible with leadership in the 

 practicable application of modern science 

 to the arts of life; from the island whose 

 language and literature have found a new 

 field and a vigorous growth in this region ; 

 from the last seat of the holy Roman Em- 

 pire; from the country which, boasting of 



the only monarch that ever made an astro- 

 nomical observation at the Greenwich Ob- 

 servatory, has enthroned science in one of 

 the highest places in its government; from 

 the peninsula so learned that we have in- 

 vited one of its scholars to come here and 

 teach us our own lang-uage; from the land 

 which gave birth to Leonardo, Galileo, Tor- 

 rieelli, Columbus, Yolta— what an array of 

 immortal names!— from the little republic 

 of glorious history which, breeding men 

 rugged as its eternal snow-peaks, has yet 

 been the seat of scientific investigation since 

 the day of the BernouUis; from the land 

 whose heroic dwellers did not hesitate to 

 use the ocean itself to protect it against 

 invaders, and which now makes us marvel 

 at the amount of erudition compressed 

 within its little area; from the nation of 

 the farthest east, which, by half a century 

 of unequaled progress in the arts of life, 

 has made an important contribution to evo- 

 lutionary science through demonstrating 

 the falsity of the theory that the most 

 ancient races are doomed to be left in the 

 rear of the advancing age — in a word, from 

 every great center of intellectual activity 

 on the globe I see before me eminent repre- 

 sentatives of that world-advance which we 

 have come to celebrate. 



Gentlemen and scholars all! You do 

 not visit our shores to find great collections 

 in which long centuries of humanity have 

 given expression on canvas and in marble 

 to their hopes, fears and aspirations. Nor 

 do you expect institutions and buildings 

 hoary with age. But as you feel the vigor 

 latent in the fresh air of these expansive 

 prairies, which has collected the products 

 of human genius by which we are here sur- 

 rounded and, I may add, brought us to- 

 gether—as you study the institutions which 

 Ave have founded for the benefit not only of 

 our own people but of humanity at large; 

 as you meet the men who, in the short space 

 of one century, have transformed this val- 



