892 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts , and Letters. 
emy has done. It would tax the powers of a much deeper and 
better-rounded man than I am to appraise at their true value 
all these papers, but I do know that they contain much of value 
to be found nowhere else. The desire to make some mention 
of those who have contributed most largely to the value of the 
Transactions is a strong one, but many of them are still living, 
some of them are here tonight, and I refrain. 
So much for the past. Let us have done with it and face the 
future. What science has done for us is an oft-told tale. How 
it has increased the productiveness of the earth; how it has 
added to our necessities, our comforts, our luxuries; how it 
has abridged time and space; how it has made the physical 
world smaller and the world of mind larger, I will not rehearse. 
Suffice it here to say that in field or office or shop, on train or 
ship, in health or sickness, in peace or war, scientific knowl¬ 
edge is becoming the condition of success, of progress, and in 
the world-family the influence of a nation is proportionate to 
the scientific knowledge possessed by its people. We sometimes 
hear of man’s mastery of nature, of his dominance over nature. 
I confess that I do not quite like the terms. A boy is said to 
have mastered the multiplication table when he has learned the 
products of the various numbers by each other, but no amount 
of such mastery can change by one jot the product of any two 
numbers. By no degree of mastery can he make the product 
of 4 by 5 either more or less than 20. Neither can man dom¬ 
inate nature. It would be nearer the truth to say that he 
learns how to be dominated by nature. And such knowledge 
influences his almost every act. No address is quite complete 
without a quotation, and so I ofier this from Emerson: “Nature 
is vast and strong, but as soon as man knows himself as its in¬ 
terpreter, knows that nature and he are from one source and 
that he when humble and obedient is nearer to the source, then 
all things fly into place.” 
But I am straying from my subject. The question is: How 
can the Academy, how can Wisconsin keep pace? The scien¬ 
tific activity of the day is great, and much work is required to 
keep abreast of it. To whom shall we look to do this work? 
