THE ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT 
THE COSMOLOGY OF THE UNIVERSE 
D. W. MOREHOUSE 
Astronomy is the original science. Its scope comprehends all 
the physical sciences — geology, physics, chemistry — - and even 
the natural sciences. All borrow from it, and in turn contribute 
to astronomical knowledge. Moreover, from the very beginning, 
the study of astronomy has been inseparably connected with phil- 
osophy and religious speculation. For its theme — its age-long 
objective — has been a true world concept. I quote: “Back of 
every religion, and of every philosophy or science, worthy of the 
name, lies a world-view, a concept in which are included all lo- 
calities and all beings supposed in that religion or philosophy or 
science to exist. In proportion to its clearness and completeness 
it, in every case, groups and mentally pictures these localities and 
beings in certain relations to each other, and thus also in their 
total unity as a universe. The science which critically investigates 
and expounds the world-view of any people or of any system of 
doctrine is called cosmology.” 
Every race has had its cosmology, the current interpretation 
of which has in many cases gone far afield through the teaching 
of various leaders in scholarship. Almost daily new facts and 
new relations have been revealed by investigators, so that any 
deduction or concept needs for its best statement continual modifi- 
cation. One needs only to call to mind the metamorphosis of 
world concepts from the days of the ancient Babylonians to the 
deductions of the theory of relativity, to support this statement. 
The history of the struggle to gain a true concept of the solar 
system is familiar to all and will be passed with this single mention. 
Today the attention of the astronomer is absorbed in a similar 
attempt to solve the cosmogony of the stellar universe. Of course 
we have long ago passed the Egyptian and Ptolemaic and have 
penetrated far into the Copernican age of siderial astronomy. Since 
the days of Halley, Wright, Kant, and La Place this concept has 
undergone continuous modification. In a masterful discussion of 
“The Structure of the Universe,” Dr. Simon Newcomb says: 
