PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS HARRIS. Ivii 



hold that all science is nothing more than description, when 

 it goes beyond that it ceases to be science and has become — 

 I am not sure what thej^ say it has become. 



Now, once we begin to use the collected data to "explain" 

 things, we are beyond merely descriptive science, beyond 

 empirical science, we have entered on rational science, the 

 science of the second order. When at last we begin to 

 speak of the Philosophy of Biology, of Embryology, and 

 so on, we have arrived at science of the third or highest 

 order. 



Few men of science can voluntarily long remain engaged 

 in science of the first order. Instinctively they ask, what 

 do these things mean, what is the bearing of all this? Luckily 

 most of us have that curiosity that cannot be satisfied with 

 merely surveying specimens on shelves in a museum or 

 columns of figures in a Blue Book. 



There is so much that seems in need of explanation. Some 

 hold that explanation is no business of the man of science. 

 I believe it is his chief business. The veriest layman cannot 

 be restrained from making his guesses into the meaning 

 of what he has seen or heard. The man of science, too, 

 makes his conjectures, his hj'potheses to account for so-and-so. 

 If right, other facts will be explained and the working hypo- 

 thesis become a rational theory of the phenomena; but if 

 wrong, he sets about forming another explanation. Darwin 

 did a great deal of this sort of thing; in fact the Darwinian 

 theory is an all-embracing explanation or correlating of an 

 enormous number of apparently unrelated observations. 

 Similarly Dalton's great work in chemistry was essentially 

 the deducing of laws of the widest application from carefully 

 ascertained experimental data. But examples need not 

 he multiplied; it is of the essence of all Natural Science, 

 for facts or objects by themselves are of no interest, no 

 utility; they lead to nothing. 



Once the working hypothesis has passed into the realm 



