Johns Hopkins University - Hullabaloo Yearbook (Baltimore, MD)

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sale, but a rich structure for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate, and a thoughtful community will cherish the student who can take us by the hand and lead us into that delightful fairy land where the eye is never satisfied with seeing nor the ear with hearing, and it will have no feeling but reverence for him who can teach us a little of these grand and awful laws through which the cosmos is moving onwards and working out its mysterious destiny. He who can f'NVander away, and away With nature that dear old nurse Who sings to him night and day The rhymes of the universe, must often pass far beyond our sight, nor, so long as he does not forget his duty to us, should we dare to arrest him by rude and clumsy suggestions which can cause nothing but a tumble, although history shows that these lofty flights are not incompatible with service to man. The Florentine peasant, who in far off Italy before the day of Columbus saw with a prophets eye so much of the path along which Galileo and Newton and Lyell and Darwin were to lead the modern world, must have passed most of his spiritual life alone. When he Dipped into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be, there was no one to whom he could tell his story of the astronomy and the physics and the geology which were to be in these later days g yet he gave us the wheel-barrow and the Last Supper, the camera of the amateur photographer and the Mona Lisa. We must encourage pure science and the search for truths too profound to be f'practical in any material sense, or even generally intelligible, but no weak and foolish brother of the laboratory should be permitted to infer that he belongs to a favored class, or has any claim to support except for service rendered. He who, for his own pleasure or distinction, spends his life in fields which yield nothing except the interest of the exploration, must look to his pleasure for his reward, since science is no more exalted by turning it into an aristocratic and exclusive pleasure ground, than by making it a shop for profit. As both heaven and earth contribute to the use and benefit of man, so the end ought to be . to separate and reject vain speculation and whatever is empty and void, and to augment whatever is solid and fruitful that knowledge may be not as a Courtesan for pleasure and vanity only, or as a bondwoman to acquire and gain for her master's use, but as a spouse for generation, fruit and comfort. I7

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which the structure of a complicated animal is unfolded step by step from its simple starting point, and illustrating the successive stages by drawings, which are shown by his references to have been both original and accurate. He goes with the fishermen to their nets and traps, learns their methods, and as they tell him of the life of whales and dolphins, he listens humbly, although they are poor slaves with none of the cul- tivated instincts of Athenian citizens. He learns all they have to tell him, and finds out, for himself, many secrets which naturalists of the nineteenth century have won honors by rediscovering. His writings on nature are not finished Works like those in logic: they are crude and imperfect, and full of short-comings, as all science still is, and must be, but they laid the foundation for science, in the study of the world as it exists outside ourselves, and to them we owe it that nature did not vanish utterly from the sight of man during the dark ages. How came the works of the same man to differ so greatly in aim and method, and in their intiuence on human progress? Aristotle lived at a time of transition 5 at the end of an order which was passing away and the beginning of one to come. His produc- tive philosophy, which takes no account of nature but centres about man, was the fruit of Athenian democracy, while we owe to Mace- donian paternalism his studies of that greater world where man has no supremacy except his power to learn and to interpret. We have outgrown paternalism, and found that we can do its work better ourselves, but the history of Athens teaches that, however en- lightened and liberal we may become as a people, pure science may still have to look elsewhere for encouragement. What nobler task can our college graduates undertake than to teach that, while the benefits which science confers are its only claims to our support, these benefits will cease as soon as they are made an end or aim. Ulf men judge that learning should be referred to action theyjudge well, but in this they fall into the error described in the ancient fable, in which the other parts of the body did suppose the stomach had been idle because it neither performed the ofhce of motion as the limbs do, nor of sense as the head doth, but yet notwithstanding it is the stomach that digesteth and distributeth to all the rest, so if any man think philosophy and universality to be idle studies, he doth not consider that all professions are from thence served and supplied. Science has no claim to support except as it contributes to man's service or to his improvement: as it has practical application, or as it adds to the innocent pleasures or to the ennobling resources of life. Bacon tells us that we must not seek in knowledge a shop for profit and 16

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Jffoarb of Cruztees. C. MORTON STEWART, l'rusz'fz':1zt. FRANCIS WHITE, LEWIS N. HOPKINS, W- L,f1 5 1ff-L 'f-. . sn- f-f-.y mv. W. GRAHAM BOWDOIN, JAMES L. MCLANE, NVILLIAM T. DIXON, HALL PLEASANTS, JOSEPH P. ELLIOTT, ALAN P. SMITH. ROBERT GARRETT, JAMES CAREY THOMAS, BENJAMIN F. NEWCOMER, DANIEL C. GILMAN, ex-ofczb