SANITARY SCIENCE, ETC. 421 



low and blue light of the spectrum itself furnishes not green but white 

 light. There are also other points of almost equal importance where 

 the old theory is at variance with the facts of Nature ; some of them 

 will be noticed further on, but, for the present, in summing up this 

 matter, we may say that, while the old theory answers tolerably — 

 only indifferently well for mixture of pigments on the painter's pal- 

 ette — it quite fails when applied with any exactitude to the explana- 

 tion or study of effects of color in Nature. 



+*» 



SANITARY SCIENCE AND PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 1 



By ANDREW D. WHITE, LL. D., 



PRESIDENT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY. 



TOU are well aware that it is not by virtue of any special claims 

 as an investigator in sanitary science, or as a student in it to 

 any great extent, that I now address you. But, when I was invited 

 to speak, it seemed a good opportunity to make one more point in be- 

 half of certain great, manly studies in our system of public instruc- 

 tion, and especially in our institutions for advanced instruction, and 

 therefore an opportunity not to be neglected. 



The generations that come after us will doubtless wonder at what this 

 age has done, but I think they will wonder far more at what it has not 

 done. There will be wonder at discoveries, inventions, reforms — at all 

 our conquests in the realms of mind and matter ; but I think the won- 

 der will grow when notice is taken of the utter neglect, in great sys- 

 tems of education, of the most important subjects which occupy us, 

 either for material purposes or for mental and moral advancement. 

 Look, first, at the neglect of political studies. Here is a great Repub- 

 lic, dependent, as all confess, upon the knowledge of those who live 

 beneath its sway. And yet you may go from one end of the country to 

 the other and hardly find the slightest provision for any real instruc- 

 tion in Political Science, whether it be in political economy or political 

 history. If, during the war of our rebellion, any thoughtful American 

 wished to find out what that history was in which the germs of that 

 great struggle were planted and developed, he had to go for such 

 knowledge to the public lecture-room of Laboulaye at Paris, or the 

 private lecture-room of Neumann at Berlin. 



The case is still worse in regard to that great class of studies com- 

 prehended under the designation of Social Science. Every year our 

 national Legislature and some forty State and Territorial Legislatures, 

 and a vast number of county and town boards, are brought face to 

 face with the most vital social problems. They are called upon to 



1 Read at the recent meeting of the American Public Health Association. 



