search, little need here be said. Ostensibly such aid is given for selfish motives, since every modern government demands the help of science in return. Nowadays no government could long exist were it deprived of all the resources for defense and intercommucation which science has invented. The relation between science and the state, therefore, is a mutual relation, and each needs the assistance of the other. In Washington the fact is manifest; it is recognized in the organization of nearly every administrative department; and nowhere is it more apparent than under the Commissioner of Patents. From science the Government is daily receiving benefits; to science, therefore, it is rightly a liberal giver; and through its patronage many investigations become possible which, because of their magnitude, would be beyond the reach of private undertaking. Doubtless the time will come when the scientific resources of the national capital will be concentrated more than they are now, and so made more efficient; and sooner or later they should be crowned by the establishment of a national university, in which the highest and most productive scholarship may find a fitting home.
So far my statements have been tinged with rose-color. The great achievements of science command our admiration, and admirable also are the agencies by which it has been advanced. Still, much remains to be done, and many are the. gaps in our knowledge. Take any important series of physical data, or any well-defined group of chemical compounds, bring the facts together in systematic form, and the strangest deficiencies will become manifest. Take, for example, those physical properties of the chemical elements which are capable of quantitative measurement, and not for one of them are the attainable data even approximately complete. Even iron, copper, gold, silver, and mercury are but imperfectly known. Were it not for theory, that apprehension of natural law through which science can prophesy, reaching out from the seen to the unseen, a great part of our knowledge would be little more than bare empiricism, and research itself would lack its keenest implement. It is common among ignorant men, themselves wildly speculative, to affect a contempt for theory, and yet without theory science could not exist. All great discoveries begin with theory, and lead up to wider generalizations upon which new researches find a secure foothold. The history of science teaches no more certain lesson than this.
It is easy to find a reason for the incompleteness of our knowledge. Apart from the vastness of the field to be explored, itself a sufficient excuse for ignorance, the more obvious deficiencies are due to excessive individualism in research. Thousands of earnest men are working independently, with insufficient reference to one
