IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 
33 
The theory of evolution perhaps furnishes one of the 
best examples of the replacement of the untruths of the 
past by truths discovered by science and of their revolu- 
tionary effect. Since the discovery of the proofs of this 
process, man has come to know himself as never before. 
He understands at least the meaning of history and 
rewrites his texts on philology, literature and all social 
and political institutions. He sees, though as yet dimly, 
some solution to the ethical problems of sin and evil, and 
beholds as in a panorama the process of his creation. 
It is as yet too soon to see the full effect of these new 
conceptions upon the social mind. Science has not yet 
come to its own in education, and the irrational and the 
unreal is far from being wholly banished from society. 
But more and more the care of the young is entrusted to 
science to train, as none other can, to be quick of eye, true 
of speech and rational in thought, to bring them face to 
face with reality and to open to their view the widest and 
most inspiring vistas. Common knowledge is one of the 
strongest social bonds. We meet and touch in what we 
know. The time has been when educated men drew 
together in a common knowledge of phrases written in 
extinct languages. To-day they find this reapproachment,. 
this consciousness of kind, more and more in a common 
training in science. In the laboratory they have meas- 
ured the energy of the falling body and studied its trans- 
formation into sound, heat, light, chemism, and electricity; 
they have tested the ray from the hydrogen atom and 
found its vibration the same from the- flame on the table 
and in the light of Sirius. They have dissected the tissues 
of life, and have read in Nature’s book the life histories of 
mountain, river and planet. And thus they have attained 
to that cosmic conception, overwhelming in its sublimity, 
which is the best gift of science to man. 
The reward which science asks for this service is the 
wages of going on; she asks for well equipped laboratories, 
for longer courses of scientific study in schools, for the 
endowment of scientific instruction and research. Such 
foundations as the Lawrence Scientific school, the Field 
