SIMON NEWCOMB. 
153 
lands have delegated their choicest intellects to carry on its 
work. They come from the country to which our republic is 
indebted for a third of its territory, including the ground on 
which we stand ; from the land which has taught us that the 
most scholarly devotion to the languages and learning of the 
cloistered past is compatible with leadership in the practical 
application of modern science to the arts of life; from the 
island whose language and literature have found a new field 
and a vigorous growth in this region; from the last seat of 
the holy Roman Empire; from the country which, remem- 
bering a monarch who made an astronomical observation at 
the Greenwich Observatory, has enthroned science in one of 
the highest places in its government; from the peninsula so 
learned that we have invited one of its scholars to come and 
tell us of our own language; from the land which gave birth 
to Leonardo, Galileo, Torricelli, 'Columbus, Volta — what an 
array of immortal names! — from the little republic of glori- 
ous history which, breeding men rugged as its eternal snow- 
peaks, has yet been the seat of scientific investigation since 
the day of the Bernoullis; from the land whose heroic dwel- 
lers did not hestitate to use the ocean itself to protect it 
against invaders, and which now makes us marvel at the 
amount of erudition compressed within its little area; from 
the nation across the Pacific, which, by half a century of 
unequaled progress in the arts of life, has made an important 
contribution to evolutionary science through demonstrating 
the falsity of the theory that the most ancient races are 
doomed to be left in the rear of the advancing age — in a 
word, from every great, center of intellectual activity on the 
globe I see before me eminent representatives of that world- 
advance in knowledge which we have met to celebrate. May 
we not confidently hope that the discussions of such an as- 
semblage will prove pregnant of a future for science which 
shall outshine even its brilliant past?” 
This occasion, which I consider to be perhaps the culmi- 
nating public function of Newcomb’s career, was a fitting 
climax to a life of research. Here in bodily presence he ap- 
peared, as he had so long been in the minds of intellectual 
workers, a great leader in the world of thought. 
