124 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



this period of trial to the organization of helpful activities, say that 

 he at once buried himself in his scientific manuscripts in a delirium 

 of detachment like absorption in a great poem. Was this not true 

 of all of us? The burden lifted, the night past, we reveled again in 

 the sun. 



It has been my constant argument in season and out of season, in 

 the presence of the members of our own craft and of those unin- 

 structed in this faith, that this science of ours, which is the key 

 to the historic development of life and of the continents and seas 

 which have nourished it, carries with it fundamental conceptions 

 which must indicate the correct relations of man to himself, to his 

 neighbors and to his intellectual and spiritual purposes. This is, 

 I believe, a sound proposition. But the belief itself does not make 

 us righteous nor does the practice of our profession of itself impart 

 righteousness. The search for and the finding of the truth is only 

 an interesting diversion unless that truth is made vital in 

 application. 



The pursuit of science does not, alas, raise a man to the practice 

 of a higher morality and it has no power to enlarge the soul of the 

 man whose concern therein is only the acquisition of new information. 

 But truth of the sort that we do pursue and find does have an engen- 

 dering virtue in its application and it should broaden our perceptions 

 of our own place and our own influence. The laws of sin and right- 

 eousness, the continuity of the straggle betwixt the physically good 

 and the evil and hence between the spiritually good and the evil; 

 the correctness of adaptations and the disasters of misfit, are ever 

 present in this panorama of life to him who will not let his vision be 

 eclipsed by details. If an undevout astronomer is mad, then 

 surely a biologist dealing with the transformations and permutations 

 of a living world, if not spiritually uplifted must be a dullard ; and so 

 we who have been detailed to chart the march of life in its courses 

 through the ages possess the competent basis of a true philosophy. 



Science, whom once the president of the United States called 

 an " ascetic nun," has in these days left her attic and come down 

 on the street ; with the glowing red symbol of the cross on her somber 

 garment she who represents us has done what she could in ministry 

 to the hurts of war. She of our science does not belong with the 

 Battalion of Death. We can not and do not need to impress on the 

 industrial world the larger importance of these principles that engage 

 us. If we are sure that this science of the progress of life carries with 

 it the guy -lines of our future progress; indeed even if we are not so 

 sure of this but may reserve such progress to the overcontrol of the 



