IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 
27 
physicist, the ethnologist, the mechanic, must assist. What a 
pathetic spectacle is presented in the charitable and mission 
work man is doing for his fellow man. It is the old story of 
eradicating one evil and sowing the seeds of a dozen more. 
How little of philanthropic work aims at more than alleviating 
present conditions! Were it not for the fact that in some 
instances, and they are all too few, the highest of scientific attain- 
ments are being directed toward studying and correlating the 
fundamental laws of society for the purpose of establishing abid- 
ing criteria of action I should deem the field of social reform 
utterly hopeless. We evidently need not so much a change of 
method here as a change from no method at all to a scientific 
method. 
The scientific world stands committed to the theory of 
evolution, for by no other can the existing order of things be 
explained, even though much is as yet unexplained. It is the 
only thing that can bind our scientific knowledge into a coher- 
ing whole. Any ignoring of it plunges into deepest empiri- 
cism. The ideas of growth, development, change from simple 
to complex, and resulting inter-relationships are extremely 
vague in popular thought. Particular modes of procedure are 
often mistaken for general principles, this or that theory for a 
law. One of the greatest obstacles that the theory of evolution, 
the only real interpreter of facts, has had to contend with has 
been and is now the widespread belief in infallibility — infallibility 
of all knowledge. Yet no more important truth needs to be 
learned than that the wisdom of to-day may become the folly of 
to-morrow. A change in belief is too often mistaken for an 
exchange of an old for a new dogma. The fact that scientific 
theories and knowledge in the year 1895 are not like those in 
the year 1859 constrains many, particularly those of a theolog- 
ical bias, to deny any truth in either. Nor do many scientists 
place themselves in any more commendable attitude. Some of 
our scientists give evidence of as intolerant a dogmatism as 
ever disgraced ecclesiastical history. The man who assumes 
infallibility of scientific knowledge, in whole or in part, thereby 
puts himself beyond the pale of truth seeking. 
President Coulter notices among botanists of to-day several 
bad tendencies. Some of them have s6 wide an application 
that I may use them in recapitulating my preceding statements: 
1. The tendency to narrowness. This is shown in the magnifica- 
tion of details, and minimizing of relationships; in the failure 
