216 HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE 



cult essentials to secure even in our comparatively late day. Anything that helps us to 

 secure it ; anything that brings nature closer to the schools, and the schools closer to na- 

 ture, is doing good far beyond the limit of the schools. Think, for a moment, of the 

 homes from which the pupils of our public schools come, of the absolute ignorance of 

 nature, of all the beauties connected with her, or of the mysteries which extend so com- 

 pletely over all. Think of the clouds that may hang heavily over house after house and 

 tenement after tenement within the limits of our city, and think how grateful the people 

 must be, that from this Society as its source, is flowing in streams through the schools 

 sweet and healing water, and is now reaching these homes ; that there is no home now so 

 far away but that nature is reaching it, and day by day will take possession of it. That is 

 the inestimable service, Mr. President, which I am here to acknowledge, and I do it with a 

 most glad and most grateful heart. It is not merely of the lessons and teachers of which 

 I have spoken. Here are these collections, whose founders are everywhere generously 

 commended. If the doors are open the light goes out through them and lights the earth, 

 and we may be glad if we can even add a hundredth part to the radiance that is every- 

 where spreading abroad from them. As gratitude, Mr. President, is always a lively sense 

 of favors to come I want to express my gratitude for the help that is yet to be given by 

 this Society to those who come after us, and the next half-century will be even more fruit- 

 ful than the last half-century has been, in maintaining the highest interest in the schools 

 and homes which Boston claims as her own. 



Address of President Eliot. 



President Charles Eliot, of Harvard University, upon being introduced to the audience 

 said : 



This Society has two distinct objects — (1) the promotion of natural history by stimu- 

 lating and aiding advanced study and original research, and (2) the enlightenment of the 

 common people concerning animate and inanimate nature. What I have to say touches 

 each of these two objects. 



It would carry us into a discussion too solemn for this occasion to attempt to state the 

 primary reasons which should induce men to study nature devotedly, although no tangible 

 benefits could ever flow from that study ; for I have never been able to find any better 

 answer to the question — what is the chief end of studying nature — than the answer 

 which the Westminster catechism gives to the question, what is the chief end of man — 

 namely, "to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever." 



I shall ask your attention to a proposition which contains only a secondary, though suffi- 

 cient, reason for fostering the study of natural history — to the proposition that the 

 human race has more and greater benefits to expect from the successful cultivation of the 

 sciences which deal with living things than from all the other sciences put together. I by 

 no means forget what mechanics and physics have brought to pass within a himdred years. 

 They have already reduced the earth to one-tenth of its former size, as regards the car- 

 riage of persons and goods, and for the transmission of thought, will, and fact, they bid fair 

 to make the whole surface of the globe as one room. They have made it easy, on the one 

 hand, to concentrate population in dense masses, and on the other to reach new soils and 



