IOWA ACADEMY OP SCIENCES. 
19 
attitude of Americans thus far has been the former, the cause is 
not far to seek. The opening up and exploitation of a new 
continent has up to this time kept our people alive as have 
been no people elsewhere on the face of the earth, perhaps in 
all historic time; but that particular form of stimulus is pass- 
ing. We are fast settling into conditions which are paralleled 
by the older nations of the world; I may not detail them here, 
but we all know that the stimulus of natural newness is pass- 
ing, and I need not tell this audience that in the organized 
efforts of scientific men, in academies and royal societies, lies 
the only hope of the promethean fire. Such institutions 
are the open court of intellectual progress, the focus of 
inventive life. They, and they alone, foster and feed the 
inventive spark that shall at length blaze in the open field of 
discovery. Literature is glorious; but on occasion she hides 
in cloisters for a thousand years, while outside her gates 
all the world may slumber; art is wonderful; but art, too, is 
hemmed in by narrow, self-determined limits; philosophy is 
reflective, and is wont to lose herself in some far off Nirvana; 
it remains for science, for science only, to find for the human 
mind employ unceasing in duration, unlimited in scope, far- 
reaching in inquiry, beneficent in its purpose, touching with 
blessing the king in his palace, the poor man in his home, the 
savage in his hovel. Literature has no new themes. She still 
seeks her models in the millennia of the past, and turns the 
kaleidoscope worn by the service of three thousand years; phi- 
losophy attempts to reason upon data confessedly uncertain, 
and accordingly from century to century makes little progress ; 
science alone finds problems forever new, bases her conclus- 
ions upon facts subject to constant verification, so that in 
an academy such as this there is perpetual reminder that the 
bounds of human knowledge are widening, and are yet to 
be enlarged. 
In no college, in no university, however well organized, do 
we attain the same result. In a university every phase of 
human learning has its appropriate place and receives equal 
consideration; here the scientific method has full sway, naught 
enters to distract or to disturb, and in the light of friendly 
criticism each finds the help and encouragement of the other 
in the sifting of truth or the proclaiming of fact already 
ascertained. 
In the second place, an academy such as ours is of highest 
