In even the briefest and most random enumeration of towering native sons it is impossible to ignore the name of William James. Here for once the suffrage of town and gown, of domestic and alien judges, is unanimous. Naturally James can never mean quite the same to the European world that he means to us, because in the United States he is far more than a great psychologist, philosopher, or literary man. Owing to our peculiar spiritual history, he occupies in our milieu an altogether unique position. His is the solitary example of an American pre-eminent in a branch of science who at the same time succeeded in deeply affecting the cultural life of a whole generation. Further, he is probably the only one of our genuinely original men to be thoroughly saturated with the essense of old world civilization. On the other side of the Atlantic, of course, neither of these characteristics would confer a patent of distinction. Foreign judgment of James’s psychological achievement was consequently not coloured by external considerations, and it is all the more remarkable that the “Principles of Psychology” was so widely and by such competent critics acclaimed as a synthesis of the first order. Without attempting to exhaust the roster of great names, I must mention Simon Newcomb and his fellow-astronomer, George W. Hill, both Copley medallists. Newcomb, in particular, stood out as the foremost representative of his science in this country, honoured here and abroad alike for his abstruse original researches into the motion of the moon and the planetary system and for his effective popularization. Henry Augustus Rowland, the physicist, was another of our outstanding men--one, incidentally, whose measure was taken in Europe long before his greatness dawned upon his colleagues at home. He is celebrated, among other things, for perfecting an instrument of precision and for a new and more accurate determination of the mechanical equivalent of heat. Among geologists Grove Karl Gilbert, famous for his exploration of Lake Bonneville--the major forerunner of Great Salt Lake--and his investigations of mountain structure, stands forth as one of our pre-eminent savants. Even those who, like the present writer, enjoyed merely casual contact with that grand old man could not fail to gain the impression that now they knew what a great scientist looked like in the flesh and to feel that such a one would be a fit member of any intellectual galaxy anywhere.