Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/379

THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE.

THE BOSTON MEETING OF THE NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATION.

It is usual for each meeting of the National Educational Association to show an attendance and to claim a success surpassing its predecessors, but the recent Boston meeting established a record that has not hitherto been approached and that will not soon be challenged. It is said that there was a registration of thirty thousand, an assemblage of teachers larger than the world has hitherto seen. Boston is no longer without rival as an intellectual center, but its preeminence in the history of education is maintained, and the intellectual and educational interests of the city are not submerged and hidden to such an extent as is the case in New York, Washington, Philadelphia and Chicago. It is thus the city which has the most to attract a great convention of teachers.

The meetings of the National Educational Association are, in a large measure, an excursion or picnic, the interest of the city and the journey counting for more than the program. There are few or no sessions in the afternoon, not more than half the members attend the sectional meetings in the morning, and not more than one tenth the general evening sessions after the first day. This is quite as it should be, for the teachers from all over the country gain much from travel, sightseeing and social exchange, whereas the programs do a good deal of threshing over of old straw. It is, however, a great stimulus for these teachers to see and hear their leaders; and it was worth going to Boston to listen to the president of the association. President Eliot, of Harvard University, who is without peer as a presiding officer and speaker.

In his presidential address entitled 'The New Definition of the Cultivated Man,' Dr. Eliot—who, it may be called to mind, was a professor of chemistry before he became the greatest college president and educational leader of the country—laid stress on the fact that the scientific method has been the means of the wonderful widening of the intellect that has occurred during the past hundred years and is as necessary for culture as are the humanities; but no special language or literature, such as Latin or Greek, is now essential. English having become incomparably the most extensive and various and the noblest of literatures. After referring to a work of Zola's, Dr. Eliot said:

Contrast this kind of constructive imagination with the kind which conceived the great wells sunk in the solid rock below Niagara that contain the turbines that drive the dynamos, that generate the electric force that turns thousands of wheels and lights thousands of lamps over hundreds of square miles of adjoining territory; or with the kind which conceives the sending of human thoughts across three thousand miles of stormy sea instantaneously on nothing more substantial than ethereal waves. There is going to be room in the hearts of twentieth century men for a high admiration of these kinds of imagination, as well a& for that of the poet, artist or dramatist. It is one lesson of the nineteenth century, then, that in every field of human knowledge the constructive imagination finds play—in literature, in history, in theology, in anthropology and in the whole field of physical and biological research. That great century has taught us that, on the whole, the scientific imagination is quite as productive for human service as the