Annual Address by the President. 
11 
say there is only this difference between them, that the scientist 
places some cogs upon the wheel of his imagination and' the artist 
prefers not to. The artist gives free rein to his fancy, and has no 
criterion of its value save the opinions of fellow critics. The scien- 
tist has constantly to check his working hypotheses when they fall 
out of harmony with the phenomena investigated. It is incorrect to 
say that Science is a matter of reason and Art of taste, for both are 
founded upon the fertility of the imagination. The artist’s enthusi- 
asm is maintained by his appreciation of the formally and chromat- 
ically beautiful, and we have tried to show that the enthusiasm of the 
naturalist is due to just the same influence. 
There have been many examples of the combination of the scien- 
tist and the artist. The greatest of them was Goethe, who, had he 
only understood human nature as did Shakespeare, would have em- 
bodied the greatest perfection of the human mind. All know his 
“ Faust, ” and his wonderfully rich word-painting; fewer are familiar 
with his important treatise on optics, and his studies on the trans- 
mutation of species and on comparative anatomy. The poet and 
dramatist Maeterlinck is at the same time a naturalist. Ruskin, 
Chaucer, Francis Bacon, Saint-Pierre, and a host of others have 
combined the poet and the naturalist. Again, how well Charles 
Kingsley and Oliver Wendel Holmes united the two paths of mind. 
Then how many painters and sculptors have been true naturalists 
at heart, particularly the greatest of them, Michael Angelo. The 
great theme of painter and poet, indeed, next to the personification 
of religious faith, has been the sea; and every naturalist knows the 
same delight is the resistless, heaving waters whose creatures he 
studies with such care. Many of our laboratories have been placed 
upon the sea-coast, and we give as the reason because the sea con- 
tains the greatest number of animal groups; but the aesthetic ele- 
ment has had its influences in the choice of such locations, and we 
can say that naturalists have been attracted quite as much by the 
beauty of the sea. Scientists are not mechanical thinkers, they are 
lovers of the natural. 
In the same way many scientists of note have engaged in literary 
and artistic labors. Newton had his flute, and Audubon his violin. 
Cuvier the anatomist is famed as the author of masterpieces of 
eulogy delivered in the French Academy, and so is the chemist 
Berthelot. And though Darwin had no ear for music, he had great 
judgment in landscape painting. 
There is no need to enlarge the list of such examples. They all 
show the essential kinship of the artistic and scientific spirit, an agree- 
ment dependent upon the appreciation of the beautiful. How often 
