86 
IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 
I am commissioned, Mr. President, to bear to the Iowa Academy the cordial 
greetings and fraternal good wishes from this, the oldest of the scientific 
organizations here represented. Our wish is that your organization may be 
abundantly prospered in its mission of increasing the sum of human knowledge^ 
and that your future may be as honorable as your past. 
GKEETINGS FROM NEBRASKA ACADEMY, BY A. E. SHELDON. 
Mr. Toast-Master: 
Nebraska owes much of her early settlement and greatness to the state of 
Iowa. Iowa people crossed the Missouri river in large numbers and participated 
in our first territorial organizations, electing themselves to ofiice in large num- 
bers and helping organize our infant commonwealth during the first years of 
our existence. We borrowed the Iowa code as a basis for our own statute law 
and included in our first constitution the provision in your Iowa constitution, 
limiting suffrage to free white males twenty-one years of age and above, thereby 
causing trouble and delay in the admission of Nebraska to full sisterhood in 
the federal union. Whole townships in Nebraska are settled with Iowa people 
and in our early years we robbed Iowa educational hen roosts of their choicest 
poultry for beginnings of our own educational system. So it is with much sense 
of indebtedness and gratitude that Nebraska brings to the Iowa Academy of 
Sciences her felicitations upon the completion of a quarter century of useful 
and happy existence. 
On the other hand, Nebraska feels with pardonable pride that she no longer 
depends upon Iowa for her culture, her wealth or her politics. For some years, 
Nebraska, as the real leader of American progress and democracy, has been 
furnishing Iowa as well as other states, with the brains and energy necessary 
to conduct their affairs. We took Prof. George G. MacLean from the chair of 
literature in Minnesota University and qualified him by life in our intellectual 
atmosphere, for the position of President of your Iowa State University. We 
took Dr. E. A. Ross from the jaws of the plutocrats of Leland-Stanford Uni- 
versity of California, gave him a free platform and full scope for his genius 
and fitted him for a position in the Wisconsin University as one of the leading 
American sociologists. We took Dr. Henry B. Ward, who sits at my right hand, 
fresh from the duelling ground of a noted German University and with sixteen 
years’ training, fitted him for the present high position he holds in the Univer- 
sity of Illinois. A young man from a neighboring state came to Nebraska with 
no capital excepting a respectable character and a voice. We fitted him for 
the high ofiice of President of the United States in less than ten years’ time, 
and on three successive occasions offered him to the people of Iowa as a proper 
man for President and three times through lack of popular education, the 
people of Iowa rejected him. You are sorry for it now, but you cannot atone 
for your past sins. So that today Nebraska, calm and self-confident in her 
natural leadership, extends to your Academy of Science, not only her felicitations 
but her full welcome into the great fraternity of fellow-workers in the cause of 
scientific advancement. 
Our congratulation takes a deeper tone than even these present recollections 
and suggestions. We rejoice with you in a quarter century of notable things 
achieved and in notable causes longed for. There is no fellowship so strong 
as the fellowship of the search for truth and in that fellowship we join with 
you in one universal brotherhood of emulation and love. 
