I often think of an old idea which I first conceived while a student at Cambridge. It is this: Our American colleges and universities should have days consecrated to the memories of what Maxwell called the fathers of the sciences, like Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Darwin, Helmholtz. I mention these names, having physical sciences in mind, but similar names can be mentioned in other departments of human knowledge. Why should not science follow the beautiful example of religion, which has its saints’ days? On these memorial days, say Newton’s birthday, an address on Newton and his work should tell the young student why Newton is the father of the science of dynamics. Dynamics is not a mere collection of inexorable physical laws which to a young student often sound like dry scientific facts and mute formulæ. Many text-books, unfortunately, represent it that way. It is a record of the life-work of men who lived human lives and became what my mother called “saints of science,” because they devoted their life-efforts to the deciphering of divine messages which, through physical phenomena, God addresses to man. The young mind should know as early as possible that dynamics had its origin in the heavens, in the motions of heavenly bodies, and that it was brought to earth by Galileo and Newton when they had deciphered the meaning of the divine message conveyed to them by these celestial motions. The Greeks of old sacrificed to their gods a hecatomb of oxen whenever one of their philosophers discovered a new theorem in geometry, and the philosopher’s memory was praised forever. The modern nations should not remain indifferent to the memory of the “saints of science,” whose discoveries have advanced so much the physical and the spiritual welfare of man. My life among the saints of Cambridge suggested this idea, and my students, past and present, know that I have always been loyal to it, because I always believed that in this manner every American college and university could raise an invisible “temple consecrated to the eternal truth” and fill it with “icons of the great saints of science.” A spirit of reverence for the science which the student is studying should be cultivated from the very start. I observed that spirit among my friends, the mathematical tripos men, at Cambridge; it was there as a part of local traditions. I certainly felt its influence, and the longer I stayed at Cambridge the more I felt convinced that “Cambridge is a great temple consecrated to the eternal truth.” This enabled me to recognize while still at Cambridge that nothing was more characteristic of the mental attitude of many scientific men in America and in England at that time than their reverence for the “saints of science” and their strong desire to build great temples “consecrated to the eternal truth.” Maxwell was one of their leaders, and the best illustration of that mental attitude. I