18 
IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 
America among our more active people The influence of a 
great intellectual center is not limited to the roster of its 
organization. The University of Michigan has educated the 
whole northwest, has influenced you and me, though we may 
never have seen its stately halls. And so I take it with an 
Academy like this; its work is far-reaching as the state 
among our own people, and far-reaching as science among the 
nations of the world; this by mere virtue of its existence, and 
all apart and distinct from the work it has been able to 
accomplish. The spectacle presented year by year of from three 
to four score, or more, intelligent men assembling at their own 
cost to discuss themes which offer no pecuniary returns, 
present or prospective, is at least sufficiently significant in 
this mercenary age of ours to demand attention. But there is 
something more. The problems we here discuss escape at 
length these halls, reach the public press, the firesides of the 
common people, and then who shall estimate the wide influ- 
ence of the Academy as a constant impulse to intellectual life, 
more and more manifest and in every way most potent. Every 
discovery made by any member of this Academy, every new 
list of plants, every new bed of clay, every planed pebble or 
fossil tooth, every public discussion of printed report, stirs as 
nothing else the intellectual life of the community where such 
discovery appears or is reported, and redeems such segment of 
our population, in so far, from that fearful stagnation into 
which, apart from such stirring, humanity is so prone to fall. 
Our present popular and highly successful geological survey 
reaching as it does one after the other, in a most efficient way, 
every county in the state, is doing a wonderful work in the 
direction indicated, and I believe it is not too much to say that 
that survey is in a large measure due to the suggestion and 
organized effort of this Academy. At any rate, the survey is but 
carrying out in a more methodic and systematic way the work 
which has constantly largely engaged us here. 
It is well for us thoroughly to understand this matter and 
betimes to put it clearly before the world. There are, as all 
history testifies, but two possible attitudes of the human mind; 
the one responsive to the stimulus of the external world, an 
attitude of inquiry, effort, search after truth with consequent 
ennobling glorious progress; the other an attitude of resigna- 
tion, inactivity, a study of death rather than life, with result- 
ant torpor, dry rot, necrosis of every noble power. If the 
