THE ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT 
AMERICAN SCIENCE 
NICHOLAS KNIGHT 
A year has gone since as an organization we met at Iowa City, 
and now we find ourselves face to face with the program and re- 
sponsibilities as )vell as the festivities of our thirty-fifth annual 
meeting. As always it has been a year of losses of scientific men 
from the state, but we have gained others, and as we survey the 
field, it has proved a year of progress and achievement. The Iowa 
Academy of Science retains its prestige among sister organiza- 
tions, and possibly has added to the laurels it already had won. 
This is a wonderful period in human history — this time of re- 
construction in which we find ourselves living and doing the work 
of our hands and brains. A writer in one of the popular maga- 
zines has declared that when the sun set on the thirty- first of 
July, 1914, it went down on the world as men knew it up to that 
time, and when it rose on the first day of August, 1914, it rose on 
an entirely new world, with new problems and new duties and new 
responsibilities. That was a remarkable period, the four years, 
three months and ten and a half days of the titanic conflict. Great 
progress was made not only in the means and instruments of de- 
stroying human life, but also in the arts and sciences and in the 
methods of conserving and prolonging human existence. 
The period of the war had to come to an end. Who of us here 
assembled can ever forget that memorable morning in November 
when we were aroused from our slumbers by the ringing of the 
joy bells and the blowing of the whistles, and we exclaimed as 
we congratulated each other in the home or met upon the street 
“the armistice has been signed ; the years, months and days of the 
cruelest, bloodiest and most needless war in the history of the hu- 
man race have come to an end” ? 
But that sentiment was only a partial truth. The joy bells did 
mark the end of the great conflict, but they likewise ushered in 
the new era, the time of re-construction, more important and won- 
derful, fraught with more serious problems, and with greater diffi- 
culties and responsibilities, yea with greater privileges, than even 
