Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/99

Rh their infinite diversity. The assembling of such a body as now fills this hall was scarcely possible in any preceding generation, and is made possible now only through the agency of science itself. It differs from all preceding international meetings by the universality of its scope, which aims to include the whole of knowledge. It is also unique in that none but leaders have been sought out as members. It is unique in that so many lands have delegated their choicest intellects to carry on its work. They come from the country to which our republic is indebted for a third of its territory, including the ground on which we stand; from the land which has taught us that the most scholarly devotion to the languages and learning of the cloistered past is compatible with leadership in the practicable application of modern science to the arts of life; from the island whose language and literature have found a new field and a vigorous growth in this region; from the last seat of the holy Roman Empire; from the country which, boasting of the only monarch that ever made an astronomical observation at the Greenwich Observatory, has enthroned science in one of the highest places in its government; from the peninsula so learned that we have invited one of its scholars to come here and teach us our own language; from the land which gave birth to Leonardo, Galileo, Torricelli, Columbus, Volta—what an array of immortal names!—from the little republic of glorious history which, breeding men rugged as its eternal snow-peaks, has yet been the seat of scientific investigation since the day of the Bernoullis; from the land whose heroic dwellers did not hesitate to use the ocean itself to protect it against invaders, and which now makes us marvel at the amount of erudition compressed within its little area; from the nation of the farthest east, which, by half a century of unequaled progress in the arts of life, has made an important contribution to evolutionary science through demonstrating the falsity of the theory that the most ancient races are doomed to be left in the rear of the advancing age—in a word, from every great center of intellectual activity on the globe I see before me eminent representatives of that world-advance which we have come to celebrate.

Gentlemen and scholars all! You do not visit our shores to find great collections in which long centuries of humanity have given expression on canvas and in marble to their hopes, fears and aspirations. Nor do you expect institutions and buildings hoary with age. But as you feel the vigor latent in the fresh air of these expansive prairies, which has collected the products of human genius by which we are here surrounded and, I may add, brought us together—as you study the institutions which we have founded for the benefit not only of our own people but of humanity at large; as you meet the men who, in the short space of one century, have transformed this valley from a savage wilderness into what it is to-day—then may you find compensation for the want of a past like yours by seeing with prophetic