Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, March 1900: Vol. 56, Nov. 1899 to April, 1900Various
History
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, March 1900: Vol. 56, Nov. 1899 to April, 1900
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
At the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science Professor Orton contributed a special paper on the local
geology of Columbus, the place of the meeting, in which he dwelt
largely on the origin of the drift that marks the superficial geology
of the vicinity.
Of the work he has done for the increase and advancement of knowledge,
the extent of a part of which we have only faintly indicated by the
mention of a few particular researches, Professor Orton put the highest
value on his labors as a teacher, a calling to which he was devoted for
more than half a century. He found peculiar pleasure in instructing
the children of the old pupils whom he had taught in his younger days.
He was actively concerned in the promotion and extension of sanitary
science, his addresses in that field having been one of the factors
that led to the establishment of the Ohio State Board of Health. He was
also greatly interested in the advancement of agriculture.
A theme on which Professor Orton was fond of dwelling in his public
addresses was the amount and value of what has been accomplished
within a comparatively short time in the world's history by the use
of the methods of science. In an address delivered before the alumni
of Hamilton College in 1888 he maintained that we were living in a
revolutionary period, which is marked by a great advance in knowledge
and a vastly larger control of the forces of Nature; by a large
increase in freedom of thought and action; by a sudden and remarkable
addition to the mobility of man, accompanied by an unexampled growth
of great cities; and by an incalculable addition to the wealth of
the world. Accompanying these great changes in the material and
intellectual world were certain moral transformations appearing to grow
out of them. All these advances were ascribed to a movement--a new
method of investigating Nature--that began, so far as its particular
and continuous development is concerned, about three hundred years
ago, but to which no date or founder's name could be attached. This
new philosophy thoroughly respected Nature, was humble, patient in the
accumulation of facts and the trial of its theories, comprehensive,
progressive, and hopeful. It has given us the marvelous increase
of knowledge which especially marks the nineteenth century; it has
impressed its influence upon all branches of study, and has wrought
great improvements in methods and results; and has rendered an immense
and inestimable service to Christian theology, and done much to broaden
and rationalize it and thus to perpetuate and strengthen its hold on
the world. Finally, the method of science was pronounced "the best gift
that God has given to the mind of man." A similar train of thought as
to the material aspects is apparent, though in a somewhat different
form, in an address on The Stored (or Fossil) Power of the World,
delivered in 1894.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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