Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/521

Rh  emotional life of childhood, in the desires and feelings. It must allow these to express themselves in sincere action. It must preserve inviolate the causal chain of desire, action, sensation, thought. Its philosophy must be monistic. It must hold fast to the organic unity of the child. 3. That the proper agents for carrying out this method and gaining this end are the best men and women that society has produced, the very flower of the race, men and women of large experience and broad culture in whom the pulse of life beats quick and high; not bookworms, not artisans, not fragments of any sort whatever, but men and women to whom Nature and circumstances have been kind, who have caught sight of the vision of the complete life, and who would make this vision prevail.



N this age of increasing specialization and multiplying societies and organizations of specialists it is well that there still remains an association broad enough to include the entire range of scientific thought and activity, and comprehensive enough to welcome all who have the disposition to explore any field in the vast domain of science.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has now for nearly half a century been a powerful factor in stimulating the progress of scientific research in America. Similar associations are found in other countries. The pioneer of all is the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which was founded at York, England, in 1832. The period following this epoch was marked by a great outburst of the spirit of research and investigation among the English-speaking people. In America the science which gained the greatest number of adherents and was prosecuted most vigorously was geology. During the decade following the organization of the British Association, James Hall was laying the foundations of that science in America by his explorations of the strata of the State of New York; Bela Hubbard was exploring the new State of Michigan; Benjamin Silliman was teaching at Yale; James D. Dana completed his college course as a pupil of Silliman, and already made a name for himself in scientific circles; and Edward Hitchcock was finding the puzzling fossil footprints of primeval reptiles, so long erroneously called "bird tracks," along the valley of the Connecticut. 