Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/203

Rh ; and transmuting the fear of God and the hopes of heaven into a zeal for the exact determination of the units of force, and a confident expectation that railroads will soon traverse all the unoccupied regions of the earth, and malleable steel replace wood in the mechanic arts.

You represent this new world, grown so suddenly old, learned, utilitarian, and critical. Your orators have a hard time of it.

Am I to be the mouth-piece of the outside world, setting forth in order what it has expected of you—its praise, its blame? Nay, what care you for praise from uninspired lips? Or what care you for blame from the vulgar herd who comprehend neither your purposes nor your methods?

Am I to be your mouth-piece to inform this outside world of what the community of science which you partly represent has been about the last twelve months, giving it such a catalogue of facts discovered, and theories established or improved, that it shall stand amazed, and bless its stars and worship? Then this address would simply be a grandiloquent stage-aside in the drama of this meeting, and no address to you.

Must I, then, speak to you as a fellow-worker in science, contributing some fresh gifts to our common stock of truths? But that would be better done, if done at all, by reading a paper on the subject in the section to which I properly belong.

I did, indeed, hesitate a while before I rejected a temptation to discuss before you this evening one or two subjects on which I have reflected for many years—for instance, the important rôle which the chemical solution of the limestone formations has played in the grand drama of the topography of the globe; the absolute inconstancy of the ocean-level; the function of variable deposition in closed basins in elevating the plane at which coal-vegetation repeated itself; the influence which anticlinals and synclinals en échelon have exercised in originally directing, and afterward perpetually shifting, the systems of river-drainage, as the general surface became lower and lower through erosion; the extraordinary differences in the amount and rate of erosion in different parts of the same region, due to the various heights and shapes of the plications—but a deep sense of insufficiency for properly handling such great subjects deterred me from the attempt. They demand the largest treatment, the fullest illustration, and the long co-operation of many minds. All the great transcendental questions of science remain open to research; not one of them has as yet been answered satisfactorily; all answers have been premature, and most of what has been published for such seems to me puerile; yet the disposition to deal in transcendental science seems to grow daily stronger. There are no laws, however, against initiation into Alpine clubs. If men choose to run fatal risks for notoriety, let them do so, in the name of all that is chilly and unprofitable; but let them not pretend that, when they reach the summit of some Jungfrau or