Proceedings of the Academy. 
709 
encouraging research by the student who is unknown and in 
developing him; in encouraging a love of knowledge for its own 
sake; of developing a knowledge of nature, and so keeping peo¬ 
ple in touch with the things about them. In this way comes a 
mastery of nature. Of the scientist it may he said that getting 
down and putting other people in touch with nature is the surest 
way of making himself a master of nature. 
Superintendent Schafer, of the Historical Society, dwelt on 
the function of encouraging the amateur in research and of con¬ 
serving knowledge by publication. In these two things the 
Academy had well justified its existence during the last fifty 
years. 
President Birge concluded the programme, declaring the meet¬ 
ing adjourned: 
“I think we shall all agree that our speakers have stuck pretty close 
to the text assigned them, and that they have presented us with vari¬ 
ous illuminating instances of the relations of the Academy to Re¬ 
search. 
The hour is late, and I am not going to add anything. Yet there 
is one thing which I should like to say, one note in some of the 
speeches which we have listened to, to which I should like to recur. 
We have been warned here against thing-mindedness, and I agree 
in the necessity and in the value of the warning. Yet I feel that the 
attitude which we of the Academy hold toward the world in which 
we are to work during the next half century on which we enter, that 
that attitude is of no small importance, and I feel that we may easily 
over-rate the thing-mindedness, the commercialism of the world at 
the present day; not perhaps in a sense that the world is not so 
commercial as we think it is perhaps; and yet when we feel that 
the world of today is peculiarly indifferent to our motives don’t we 
make a mistake? Of whom do we seek when we desire to get that 
expression? We go back to Wordsworth; “The world is too much 
with us”. Well, that was written nearly one hundred and twenty 
years ago, and it was written I think at a breathing spell in one of 
the great heroic periods of English history, at the pause in the great 
Napoleonic warfare, just before the struggle of a dozen years which 
terminated at Waterloo. The world was too much with them. 
Wordsworth was right. And yet after all as we look back upon that 
period we say “Those were heroic days”, and we contrast them with 
the commercialism of our own day. Yet how will people look back 
upon our own day? How will people look back upon the history of 
the last five years? Will they look back upon those years as years 
of commercialism, or as years of heroism? We have seen in the far 
east—not the technical far east, but the far east of Europe—not 
individuals, but nations, not highly educated, but people of every 
grade, by the million, ready to die the most cruel deaths in behalf 
