PRESIDENT GILMAN'S ADDRESS
The Relation of the Sheffield Scien-
tific School and its Work to the
Times and to the Progress
of Science in the Last
Fifty Years.
[Being the full text of the address oy (ee iscien-
tific School, the slips being revised
by President Gilman. }
This is the hour for congratulation
and reminiscence. It is our privilege
to look backward over the path of half
a century and to trace the steps, often
slow but never devious, by which the
penniless, nameless and homeless off-
spring of an ancient and vigorous stock
has attained commanding influence, rich
in possessions, beloved by thousands of
followers, honored wherever known,
and still with the fresh enthusiasm of
youth, aiming at lofty ideals, attrac-
tive as the face of nature, varied and
comprehensive as the laws by which
this world is governed.
It would be easy, and’ it might be
profitable, to engage in an exclusive
commemoration of those who have
made this institution, and to bring for-
ward reminiscences of incidents and
events—some of them truly romantic—
which illustrate the progress of its
remarkable life; yet the dignity of this
assembly, the presence of so many per-
sons from a distance, and the relation
of the Sheffield School to higher edu-
cation in the United States forbid such
limitations. You must therefore per-
mit me to give a subordinate place to
those sentiments which are uppermost
- in our hearts—congratulations mingled
with affection and gratitude, and with
vivid memories of those who have de-
parted—while I try to do justice to
their wise and assiduous labors by
showing their relation to the times and
to the progress of science in the latter
half of the nineteenth century.
If the Antiquary should now appear,
you would be sure to remember that.
his task had already been well per-
formed; and if I should assume the
garb and chisel of Old Mortality, you
might remind me that the moss has
not yet gathered upon the inscriptions
in yonder cemetery.. While Argus and
Briareus, the one for the University
and the other for the School of Science,
are on the alert, it requires some assur-
ance to traverse the annals which they
have collated; and yet this discourse
must be historical. So in face of diff-
culties, enhanced by the distance which
has separated the speaker from these
once familiar scenes, from, muniments
and archives, I enter upon the duty of
the hour, conscious of the honor re-
ceived from your courtesy and grateful
for an opportunity to stand once more
among former colleagues, pupils and
friends. It is a delight to see this
favored university renewing its youth
at the approach of its second centen-
nial anniversary—more comprehensive,
more useful, more liberal and more
worthy than ever before of loyal affec-
tion and support.
A PRE-NATAL EXISTENCE.
Eighteen hundred and forty-seven is
the year of our nativity. But there
was a pre-natal existence worth re-
membering, and there was a reincarna-
tion, if not a regeneration, when the
school was christened by the name of
Sheffield. Yale College has always
stood for Science, and it therefore is no
wonder that those who initiated the de-
partment of Philosophy and the Arts,
just after President Woolsey assumed
the chair, had faint notions of the im-
portance of their proceedings. They
were quite unconscious of developing
new forces. Mr. Bryce, in his sketch
of the Holy Roman Empire, remarks
that the year A.D. 476, which school-
boys are taught as one of the most im-
portant dates in everybody’s chronol-
ogy—the downfall of the Roman Em-
pire—was no such date to those then
living as it has sincé become, nor was
any impression made on men’s minds
commensurate with the real signifi-
cance of the event. So it is in our
academic chronology. As conclusive
evidence, recur to this modest an-
nouncement originally made in the
Catalogue of 1847.
YALE ALUMNT
“Tt has long been felt at Yale College
to be important to furnish resident
graduates and others with the oppor-
tunity of devoting themselves to spe-
cial branches of study, either not pro-
vided for at present, or not pursued as
far as individual students may desire.”
Accordingly the department of Philos-
ophy and Arts is established. By this
simple decree the system of graduate
studies now in vogue throughout the
land was formally inaugurated. More-
over an inconspicuous postscript states
that “Professors Silliman and Norton
have opened a laboratory on the Col-
lege grounds for the purpose of practi-
cal instruction in the applications of
science to the arts and agriculture.”
A BIRTH, WITH IDEALS AND AN EMPTY
PURSE.
Thus was born the Sheffield School,
with the inheritance of an opportunity,
a desire, a hope and a belief, supported
by an empty purse and slight expecta-
tions.
‘‘ That primal age which did as gold excel
Seasoned its acorns with keen appetite | 2
And thirst to nectar turned each springing well.
To illustrate the evolution of this idea,
then first proclaimed among us, to
show what ingredients it included, what
unexpected nurture it received, what
storm and stress it survived; especially
to show that this idea was planted in
fertile soil by the spirit of our age, the
Zeitgeist, believing and delighting in the
study of nature and her laws, we must
consider the state of mankind in the
middle of the nineteenth century, and
the conditions of liberal education then
prevalent in the United States and
England. No milestone marks the
transition from the old to the new, yet
the older men in this assembly are con-
scious that this is a very different state
of society from that of 1847. The edu-
cation, the creeds, the industries, the
commence, and of course the science
and the arts of civilized countries are
changed. This: ae. a..freer,° btisier,
wealthier, more complex, and indeed a
wiser and happier world than that of
our fathers—before the gold of Califor-
nia and Australia and the diamonds of
South Africa had been discovered, or
the magic spark, flashing over land
and sea, had transformed the usages of
domestic life and the processes of inter-
national intercourse; or the life-giving
agencies, the heaven-sent blessings of
anzesthesia and antisepsis, had removed
from the bed of pain, apprehension and
distress.
EPOCH-MAKING PAPERS.
It was the middle of this century
when the doctrine of evolution, which
has pervaded every branch of natural
history, and extended its influence to
medicine, anthropology, sociology and
history, was publicly set forth, a period,
as a recent historian has shown, in
which a doctrine that may be traced to
Empedocles, Heraclitus and Aristotle,
found “its perfect expression” in the
writings of Charles Darwin. On the
evening of July 1, 1858, a day almost
as memorable as that when the istand
of Guanahani was revealed to Colum-
bus, the epoch-making papers of Dar-
win and Wallace were read to the Lin-
nzan Society of London; but it should
not be forgotten that, sixteen years be-
fore, Darwin had written out a sketch
of the Origin of Species, and with won-
derful self-control had kept it in his
portfolio while he gave eight patient
years to the study of barnacles. We
have the authority of Sir Archibald
Geikie for saying that the two geologi-
cal chapters in the’Origin of Species
produced the greatest revolution in
geological thought which has occurred
in our time. It was in 1860, when
Herbert Spencer announced the pro-
gramme of his philosophical system;
but nine years earlier he had printed a
volume entitled “Social Statics, or the
conditions essential to human happi-
ness specified and the first of them
developed.” Lyell had been for a long
while the leading authority of England
in the science of Palzontology, but the
startling book in which he demon-
strated the antiquity of man did not
appear until five years after the publi-
cation of the Origin of Species. This
_ is not the place to discuss the far-reach-
ing and all-pervading influences which
proceeded from these writings, nor to
dwell on the controversies they evoked,
such as those with which we are famil-
iar between Agassiz and Gray, but l
‘
WEEKLY
bring these instances forward as indi-
cations of the extraordinary intellectual
vitality of the middle of the nineteenth
century and of the changes in human
thought of which this school has been
the watchful observer.
I have the authority of an eminent
naturalist for saying that “the most
significant aspect of this movement is
the general recognition, by all thought-
ful men, of the proof which was
afforded by the progress of discovery, .
of the truth that the unity of nature is
orderly, and discoverable by scientific
methods.”
IN. PHYSICS.
In the domain of physics, changes
have occurred almost as_ remarkable.
The doctrine of the conservation and
correlation of forces, beginning with a
determination of the mechanical equiv-
alent of heat, was suggested and de-
veloped between the years 1842 and
1862 by Mayer, Grove and Joule.
Faraday was then at the zenith of his
powers, Helmholtz and Kelvin at the
outset of their illustrious careers. But
it was as far back as 1830 when Joseph
Henry, then a schoolmaster in a coun-
try town, reached those discoveries in
electromagnetism which made the tele-
graph a proximate certainty and
brought into the intercourse of man-
kind a revolution almost as great as
the primitive invention attributed to
Cadmus. Spectrum analysis, that
powerful agency which reveals the con-
stituents of every burning body, even
the chemical and physical nature of the
remotest stars, was then unknown. At
any rate it did not go beyond a beauti-
ful exhibition of the colors of the
prism.
MATHEMATICS AND ASTRONOMY.
Likewise glance at mathematics and
astronomy fifty years ago. Laplace
had been dead for over twenty years;
Gauss was living in an advanced age;
Sir Wm. Rowan Hamilton had an-
nounced but had not published the new
calculus—Quarternions—which was to
give him rank with the greatest mathe-
maticians; Abel, Cayley, Sylvester, and
Hermite were at the portal of those in-
vestigations which have made their
names illustrious in the science “which
never takes a backward step.” The
abstract reasonings of such men are be-
yond the apprehension and apprecia-
tion of minds non-mathematical; but
this is not true of astronomy, for every
human being, the wayfarer and the
shepherd, as truly as the philosopher,
is interested in the progress of celestial
science. No purely scientific discovery
within our memory has made such an
impression on the popular mind as that
of the planet Neptune, whose existence,
foretold by Adams and Leverrier, was
demonstrated on the night of Septem-
ber 23, 1846. Then the fortunate as-
tronomer of Berlin turned his lens, by
request, to the predicted place, and rec-
ognized as a planet that vast orb
which had been circling in solemn
silence for countless ages thousands of
million miles from the sun. This
superb achievement, like the torch
bearers of Aurora’s car, was the pre-
cursor of a long series of splendid addi-
tions to astronomical science, as well
as of great improvements in the tele-
scope and of great endowments for as-
tronomical research. But most unex-
pectedly a new astronomy has supple-
mented the old, and celestial physics is
standing side by side with celestial me-
chanics as the interpreter of the mys-
teries of the universe. Surprising as
was the revelation of Neptune, wonder-
ful as are the maps of the heavens, and
the calling of the stars by their names,
it is more remarkable that astronomy
can now tell us the constituents of
every heavenly body. This is the tri-
umph of spectrum analysis, already
mentioned, the contribution of chemis-
try and physics to astronomy, an in-
evitable evolution from the researches
of Kirchhoff and Bunsen, in 18509.
A HOST: OF OTHERS.
I am in danger of multiplying these
fascinating allusions, and of trying to
give in a single page an abstract of a
~cyclopedia, which would be the task
of Icarus, predestined to fall; but men-
tion must be made, if it be only with a
word, of recent advances in some other
departments of science. Think of geol-
ogy, including paleontology on One
side and petrography on the other; of
chemistry, with its revelation of new
elements, leading up to the Neptune-
like discovery of Argon; and with its
innumerable contributions to agricul-
ture, metallurgy and pharmacy, | tO
color, food, and flavor; of engineering
and mechanics with their acquired con-
trol of force and matter, in ordnance,
ships, dynamos, engines, bridges, 21=
ships and tunnels; of the sciences Ol!
metallurgy, meteorology, geodesy, €xX-
ploration, navigation and aerostatics.
It is truly a half century of marvels pro-
ceeding from the patient, unrequited,
unseen pursuit of science by men of €x-
traordinary ability and of absolute con-
centration to the advancement of
knowledge. By common consent, it 1S
known as the age of electricity, and the
history of that single branch of science
verifies a saying of Faraday’s, which
was early adopted in this school,
“There is nothing so prolific in utilities
as abstractions.” But every science has
made its contributions to the advance-
ment of the race, and every advance has
made more obvious the mystery of
existence and increased the humility of
man as he thinks of that which tran-
scends his reason.
As ‘knowledge grows from more to more,”’
So ‘more of reverence with us dwells.’’
Different minds will place different
estimates on the intellectual accom-
plishments of these recent years. In
ordinary conversation the men of the
mart will point to an Atlantic cable,
an Eiffel tower, a suspension bridge, a
continental express train, a man-of-war,
a Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, or a
great exhibition. On the other hand,
scholars of the lamp, like Freeman, will
give precedence to the comparative
method of study now employed in his-
tory, language, politics, economics and
religion. But before this assembly I
venture to claim that the greatest tri-
umphs of the intellect during the last
half-century are these five contributions
to human knowledge: The establish-
ment of the principles of evolution; the
establishment of the principles of the
conservation of energy; the develop-
ment of mathematical science and its
applications to physics, mechanics,
electricity and astronomy; the develop-
ment of spectrum analysis and the con-
sequent discoveries respecting light and
electricity; and the discovery of the
nature and functions of bacteria, and of
their influence, for weal or woe, upon
living organisms.
To these may be added, perhaps, the
birth of experimental psychology, a
child so young that though it seems to
belong to the family of Hercules, its
strength has not been fairly tested.
EDUCATIONAL QUESTIONS.
It is time to turn from the aspects of
science to those of education. Prior
to the days of Faraday, Darwin and
Huxley, of Agassiz, Dana and Whit-
ney, the classics held their sway and
controlled with almost absolute su-
premacy the liberal education of Eng-
land and the United States. The bene-
fits of instruction in Latin and Greek,
enormous as they were, received ex-
aggerated praise, in spite of the dictum
of Sir Wm. Hamilton, which was often
quoted, that nothing brought the clas-
sics into such disrepute as requiring
them of every student. To enforce this
statement it is not necessary to appeal
to the opponents of classical culture.
The words of a renowned scholar, dis-
tinguished for his knowledge of antiq-
uity and his love of the ancient land-
marks, tell the story well. The classi-
cal revival, says Freeman, “in all its
forms and stages, fostered the idea that
the languages, the arts, the history of
Greece and Rome at certain stages of
their being, were the only forms of
language, art and history which de-
served the study of cultivated men. It
led to the belief, not perhaps fully put
forth in words, but none the less prac-
tically acted on, that those two lan-
guages, and all that belonged to them,
had some special privilege above all
others—that the studies which were
honored by the ambiguous name of
‘classical’ were fenced off from all
others by some mysterious barrier—
that they formed a sacred precinct
which the initiated alone might enter
and from which the profane were to be
jealously shut out. Such a state of
feeling, a feeling which has even now
far from died out, could not fail to lead
to mere contempt, and thereby to mere