34 
IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 
Columbian Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution, are 
examples of appreciation as yet as rare as munificent. I 
am not aware of any such in Iowa. When wealth builds 
the spacious laboratory or endows a chair in science in any 
college of the commonwealth, it is but rendering to science 
her own. Each dollar earned by railway, telegraph and 
telephone, mine and quarry, mill and factory, farm and 
store, may well pay tithe to science which has made these 
industries possible. The gratitude for a life saved by the 
application of science in modern medicine might well be 
generous. And yet the total gifts to scientific instruction 
in Iowa, by men of wealth, do not exceed $50,000. I am 
aware of the state appropriations to the scientific depart- 
ments in our state institutions, and I should be glad to call 
them generous. At least they have given Iowa the fame 
of men whose work in science has achieved national recog- 
nition. But these yearly appropriations, were they many 
times as great, could not supply the place of the great 
gifts, endowments to be for all time reservoirs of power 
transmuted constantly into the highest social service. It 
is the boast of American democracy that by such votive 
offerings it shows appreciation of education, charity, and 
scientific research. 
As members of a guild of workers in science, let us be 
thankful for even the humblest place. To discover any 
fact, however trivial, to add anything however slight, to 
the sum of human knowledge, this is to shape and dress 
some stone for the building of science, the home and 
shelter of the race. Our contribution may go to chink 
some crevice or at last some master builder may find in it 
the keystone of an arch or the cap stone of a column, but 
whatever its place, if our work was well and truly done, it 
abides, as a permanent service to society. 
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