Western Society of Naturalists. 995 
the methods of minute measurement, and those of microphotography, 
the preparation of serial sections and the like—all to be used, per- 
haps, as illustrations of the general method of science at large. 
For, after all, the method of science, if the general public only 
knew it, is of greater importance to them than its matter. The 
method of science is simply the swre method, and the simplest and 
most economical consistent with certainty. Any other is either 
wasteful or unsafe. To know, to appreciate, to command this 
method, is to control resources beside which the mere knowledge of 
facts has but little significance. 
It will be the most important public function of this Society to 
extend the knowledge and the use of the method of science, applied 
in the spirit of science, among the unscientific. The great mission 
of science is two-fold—to reveal the universe, and to rationalize the 
human mind. The first of these tasks, vast as it is, is still compara- 
tively easy, for it is wrought out directly by the scientist himself 
applying the methods and apparatus of research to the facts of 
nature; but the second is immeasurably more difficult, because it 
can only be accomplished by a sort of a beneficent contagion affect- 
ing the spontaneous activities of the individual mind; by the 
persuasive influence of example, and a perceived superiority of 
results. To improve every occasion to expose, to commend, and to 
illustrate the scientific method, to encourage its application, to lead 
in its use in the common affairs of life and society —in business, in 
politics, in ethics, in whatever affects the welfare of man as a social 
being, is a duty to our kind, the importance of whose performance 
we shall never perhaps see more eloquently illustrated than by the 
occurrences of the present moment, when some of the greatest 
Interests of one of the greatest nations of history are hanging on the 
decision of a purely scientific question by unscientific minds, worked 
upon by methods as little scientific as one can well imagine. 
It thus seems certain, finally, that our young Society cannot 
languish for want of a field appropriate and peculiar to itself, for 
lack of a varied, greatly needed, and highly important work, bene- 
ficial to its members and to the general community—a work which 
nothing else is now attempting, and which, if we do not do it, 
seems likely to remain undone. The quality of our membership, 
the number and spirit of those in attendance on this, our first 
