36 
Silently, steadily, resistlessly the aew has moved on regardless of the contempt, 
the pity, the tolerance of the old. Ere long the new institutions, retaining for the 
most part the classics and the philosophies of the old, established chemical, physical, 
biological, and engineering laboratories on a scale of expenditure and completeness 
Ear beyond the in 'sources of the old; they set the pace for scientific study and investi- 
gation in America. By their bold experiments and stupendous results they startled 
the old institutions out of their complacent lethargy and roused them to an activity 
hitherto unknown. They made it manifest that classical' and philosophical attain- 
ments and discipline could exist side by side with thorough training and far- 
reaching acquirements in natural science, and that these latter found an application 
in the development of agriculture and manufacturing industry out of all proportion 
to the original conception on which the legislation of L862 was based. 
A few of the older universities, originally denominational but long since secular- 
ized — Vale, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia — with prestige, large endowments, and 
wealthy alumni, who have contributed freely to enlarge the sphere of their capabil- 
ity and activity; ami a few recently founded and endowed by individual munifi- 
cence on a scale of unprecedented liberality — Johns Hopkins, belaud Stanford, and 
Chicago University — stand well to the front and maintain each a staff of workers in 
the held of investigation who are the peers of any in the land. Most of the others, 
especially those; which are dependent upon denominational support, have fallen 
hopelessly to the real-. The colleges ami universities established under the Con- 
gressional act of L862, whose areas of activity were enlarged by the supplementary 
legislation of 1887 and 1<S*:0, have grown so rapidly that they are now recognized in 
most of the States as the chief exponents of the higher education coupled with the 
practical education which finds expression in ever multiplying bushels of wheat and 
bales of cotton and tons of steel — an education which conditions and renders pos- 
sible the supremacy of America in productive activity and commercial enterprise. 
But our scientilic achievements and their translation into material wealth must 
not be content with these triumphs. The last forty years — a period coincident with 
the life of these institutions — have witnessed an increase in population and in wealth 
such as the dreams of the most sanguine could not have ventured to anticipate. No 
parallel for it exists either in ancient or in modern history, either in the Old World 
or in the New; and the actually realized power and wealth of the nation are but the 
beginning of greater and mightier things yet to be. Within another half century 
our population will have quadrupled, our wealth increased in 'more than corre- 
sponding proportion, and our strength on land and sea such that no power or combina- 
tion of powers will be able to gainsay or resist. In this mighty onward march the 
State colleges and universities will lead the van. But they must do more than point 
the way which leads to material wealth and dominion. Problems relating to mind 
and matter of surpassing interest to mankind are pressing for solution, and to their 
solution the scientists and laboratories of these colleges and universities must con- 
tribute an adequate if not a preponderant share. 
For example, I have seen it stated that the theory set forth in Prof. Osborne Rey- 
nolds's Sub-Mechanics of the Universe "that not a flawless, continuous ether, but a 
granular structure of the spaces of the universe that not only explains all observed 
phenomena and the cans- of gravitation, but reveals the prime cause of the physical 
properties of matter finds for the present one of its chief facts of interest in the 
fact that few if any of living mathematicians are capable of following his demon- 
strations and none are strong enough to attack it." 
Sir William Crookes, in an address to the International Congress for Applied 
Chemistry at Berlin, June 4 of this year, said that chemists now admit "the possi- 
bility of resolving the chemical elements into simpler forms of matter or even of 
refining them away altogether into ethereal vibrations of electrical energy." He 
further declared that "a number of isolated hypotheses as to the existence of mat- 
ter in an ultragasi'ous state, the existence of material particles smaller than atoms, 
the existence of electrical ions or electrons, the constitution of Rontgen rays and 
their passage through opaque bodies, the emanations from uranium and the disso- 
ciation of the elements are now welded into one harmonious theory by the discov- 
ery of radium." He added that if the hypothesis of the electronic constitution of 
matter were pushed to its logical limit "it is possible that we are now witnessing 
the spontaneous dissociation of radium, and if so must begin to doubt the perma- 
nent stability of matter. If this be so the 'formless mist' must once more reign 
supreme and the visible universe dissolve." 
Sir Oliver Lodge in the Romanes lecture delivered at Oxford on the 14th of June 
suggested that "atoms of matter are actually composed of concentrated portions of 
electricity which could exist separately or in association. Seven hundred such 
electrons in violent orbital motion among themselves would constitute an atom of 
