SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 
162 
While built primarily for the purpose of storing water for their own lands, it will also 
irrigate a large acreage of adjacent lands and result in the development of one of the most 
important agricultural areas of the state. 
The builders of this enterprise, in investing their capital, have taken all the chances, while 
the public and the state receives a large portion of the benefits. 
Mr. Springer’s name has been frequently mentioned for the highest political honors 
within the gift of the state, but his inclination has led him away from the field of politics. 
His wise counsel, his cool and deliberate judgment, have always been sought by the 
leaders of the state, and his influence and counsel has been a most important factor in guiding 
the state through her territorial period into full statehood and in framing her laws and 
constitution. 
Mr. Springer was one of the first to see in New Mexico the meaning of her past, the value 
of her present, and the promise of her future. 
In addition to his own constructive work, his assistance and support have been of im- 
measurable value to those other pioneers who have labored to establish and build up the educa- 
tional and scientific institutions of the state. 
Dr. Hewett: We have heard of Mr. Springer’s activities in law and busi- 
ness. We may now hear something said of his achievements in science. I have 
the pleasure to introduce the distinguished President of the Southwestern Divi- 
sion of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dr. D. T. 
MacDougal, of the Carnegie Institute, head of the Desert Botanical Labora- 
tories at Tucson and Carmel. 
The Business Man in Science 
Dr. MacDougal: Ladies and Gentlemen: The honor which comes to me is in no sense 
personal. I feel that I am here representing the 12,000 members of the American Association 
for the Advancement of Science — an association made up of men whose biographies would 
be the history of science of the world for the last seventy-five years. I feel especially happy 
on this occasion because the subject of our felicitations represents the very ideal and essence 
of this association which has given so much to the world. I have no compromises to make. 
I can speak frankly, and it is not often that a speaker on these occasions can go without limits. 
In order to put to you how a scientist would feel about this matter, I must go aside for 
the moment and consider the state of society in which we live. In a democratic form of gov- 
ernment our educational, scientific and artistic work must take the form of generalized effort 
which mostly has no high peaks. To illustrate what I mean by that : an organization may 
employ a great artist to make pictures ; may give him so much for the month or day ; and in 
spite of the fact that they are in harness, our musicians, artists and poets do great things. But 
the great creative work of the world is done on individual initiative. Quite regardless of what 
may or may not happen in Russia or in any other experiment, rational or crazy, whose nature 
is always such that the group of people whom James Harvey Robinson has designated as “ the 
wonderers ” — and in that group he includes the scientists, the poets and the artists — the 
creative work of these people will be done not under direction but as a matter of personal 
effort — driven from within and not from without. 
I am not here to decry democratic government, whatever its failings and failures may 
have been. But I do wish to emphasize some of the finer graces that may arise on the basis 
and on the substratum of sound democracy. The most precious thing that can come from such 
a substratum is a sense of service, a sense of indirect accomplishment. The artist or the scien- 
tist who gives himself to his own longings, who pleases his own curiosities, who does his work 
not because he is told to — these are the men who achieve. 
