The problem before the organizers of this
Congress was, therefore, to bring the sciences together, and seek
for the unity which we believe underlies 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 practical 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, remembering a
monarch who 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 and tells us of 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 across the Pacific, which, by half a century of unequalled
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 centre of
intellectual activity on the globe I see before me eminent
representatives of that world--advance in knowledge which we have
met to celebrate.
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