Here we have a field in
which the non-survival of the unfit is the rule in its most
ruthless form. The journals that we see and read are merely the
fortunate few of a countless number, dead and forgotten, that did
not know what the public wanted to read about. The eagerness shown
by the representatives of your press in recording everything your
guests would say was accomplished by an enterprise in making known
everything that occurred, and, in case of an emergency requiring a
heroic measure, what did NOT occur, showing that smart journalists
of the East must have learned their trade, or at least breathed
their inspiration, in these regions. I think it was some twenty
years since I told a European friend that the eighth wonder of the
world was a Chicago daily newspaper. Since that time the course of
journalistic enterprise has been in the reverse direction to that
of the course of empire, eastward instead of westward.
It has been sometimes said--wrongfully, I think--that scientific
men form a mutual admiration society. One feature of the occasion
made me feel that we, your guests, ought then and there to have
organized such a society and forthwith proceeded to business. This
feature consisted in the conferences on almost every branch of
astronomy by which the celebration of yesterday was preceded.
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