550 
PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 
of Transactions of the Royal Society, which occupied the shelves behind 
and on the right of his chair, by way of refreshment before calling the 
Society to order. 
Perhaps half a dozen here present were also present at the first meeting 
for organization, in March, 1871, in the Regents’ room at the Smithsonian 
Institution, and may remember the discussion as to whether occasional 
refreshments in the shape of crackers and beer would or would not pro¬ 
mote the objects of the Society. 
I hope that most of you are familiar with the main points in the first 
anniversary address on the character and object of the Society, made by 
Professor Henry in 1871, even though you may not have been present at 
its delivery. He said that its objects were to be the consideration of 
positive facts and laws of the physical and moral universe, rather than 
speculation as to possibilities, and that it was to be a local establishment, 
arrogating nothing to itself on account of its position at the capital, and 
making no claim to being in any respect a special representative of the 
science of the country. He said: “ It is of the first importance that the 
operations of this Society be conducted with great care, and that nothing 
be given to the world under its sanction which is not based upon thorough 
investigation of established scientific principles. We should be warned 
by the fate of a society established in this city some thirty years ago, which, 
although it included among its members a few men of true science, was 
under the control mainly of amateurs and politicians, and therefore was 
unfit to discharge the duties which it claimed as one of its functions, to 
decide questions of a strictly scientific character.” 
In the main, the Society has continued to work on the lines indicated 
in this address. Counting by years, it is yet young, only twenty-two 
years old, yet what changes in its field of observation and in its surround¬ 
ings can be noted by its few surviving founders as they look back over 
this brief period. Each of you in his„own line of study and work knows 
of the advances and changes. I will refer to but one, the one with which 
I am most familiar, the science of bacteriology, which has been wholly 
developed within the last twenty years, and which is opening up a new 
branch of chemistry and leading to new methods in preventive medicine 
and therapeutics. 
But if the Society is young in years, she is full grown and has a number 
of flourishing children—biological, anthropological, chemical, geological, 
and so on—all of whom we consider as part of the family, and from whom 
we expect to hear in the course of the evening. Some of her children and 
members have been a little impatient at times with the old lady, thinking 
her a little slow and unprogressive, and that her general style of house¬ 
keeping was not as brilliant as it might be, but she has gone on in a steady 
respectable fashion, and has always been in the best society. 
Science is becoming fashionable of late years, and, as a natural conse¬ 
quence, a sort of scientific demi-monde has been evolved, but it has not 
yet been made at home in the hall of the Philosophical Society. We old 
gentlemen of the last generation prefer that this should be so. We may, 
