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. The fact that beyond the
acceptance of a graceful compliment I contributed nothing to these
conferences relieves me from the charge of bias or self-assertion in
saying that they gave me a new and most inspiring view of the energy
now being expended in research by the younger generation of
astronomers. All the experience of the past leads us to believe that
this energy will reap the reward which nature always bestows upon those
who seek her acquaintance from unselfish motives. In one way it might
appear that little was to be learned from a meeting like that of the
present week. Each astronomer may know by publications pertaining to
the science what all the others are doing. But knowledge obtained in
this way has a sort of abstractness about it a little like our
knowledge of the progress of civilization in Japan, or of the great
extent of the Australian continent. It was, therefore, a most happy
thought on the part of your authorities to bring together the largest
possible number of visiting astronomers from Europe, as well as
America, in order that each might see, through the attrition of
personal contact, what progress the others were making in their
researches. To the visitors at least I am sure that the result of this
meeting has been extremely gratifying. They earnestly hope, one and
all, that the callers of the conference will not themselves be more
disappointed in its results; that, however little they may have
actually to learn of methods and results, they wil