Annual Address by the President. 
13 
years, as notably in the case of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and we loosely 
say that the child has become a poet. We should say: the child has 
remained a poet. For it may very well be that the growth of the 
mind from infancy, like that of the body certainly, is a process of 
increasing specialization with the progressive loss of certain early 
potentialities; and that our teaching developes one side to the sup- 
pression of the others, but does not really create any new tendency. 
It is very much the same kind of facination that forms the investi- 
gator in Science. He feels himself irresistibly drawn to the unknown, 
as to a magnet of desire, as to something accordingly that is to be 
pursued for its promise of revealed beauty. Just this is the bond 
of union between the poet and the naturalist. And through all 
ages the truly great poets and truly great naturalists have recog- 
nized this brotherhood. 
This leads us to another general conclusion. No thoroughly scien- 
tific interpreter, one with a longing to explain the mysterious and 
with a real love for the objects of his study, can be without a religion. 
Linnaeus stated this: “0 Jehova, quam ampla sunt tua opera, 
quam ea omnia sapienter fecisti quam plena est terra possessione 
tua.” For the study itself creates an object of worship and thereby 
engenders a belief. The broader this field of knowledge, the more 
comprehensive the religion. The earlier naturalists recognized this 
more fully than we are apt to do to-day, men like Leon Dufour, Yon 
Baer, De Candolle and Louis Agassiz; they all felt they were expon- 
ents of a religion of Nature, priests before her altar. Did not Lessee 
write on the religion of entomology? The scientist who succinctly 
appreciates Nature embodies a feeling of reverence and awe to her, 
and realizes to the full how vast is the length and depth of the un- 
known. What is religion but praise and worship? Formulation of 
a creed is theology, churches have been impositions upon religion 
and not outgrowths from it. Andrew J. White has put it rightly, 
that there has been much warfare between science and theology but 
none between science and religion. The naturalist’s idea of move- 
ment and of life, his appreciation, which may amount to worship, 
of the beautiful and lucid, and his longing to penetrate the unknown, 
all these make for a religion. There are times when he can not help 
considering the inception of things, for he has no right to stop short 
of beginnings. And whether he accepts the conception of one or of 
many Gods, or prefers to speak of an initial Unknown, or to regard 
Nature coterminous with God, he is bound to perceive the essential 
unity and order in all phenomena, and to stand in awe, reverently, 
before the great plan of perfection. Only the little, cramped thinker 
judges there is no mystery and that all will sometime be explained. 
