The great educational yield of a universal exposition comes from the intellectual more than from the mechanical processes. It is the material condition of the times. It is as well the duty of the responsible authorities to go yet further and record the thoughts and theories, the investigations, experiments, and observations of which these material things are the tangible results. A congress of arts and science, whose membership is drawn from all educational as well as geographical zones, not only accounts for and analyzes the philosophy of conditions, but points the way for further advance along the lines consistent with demonstration. Its contribution to the hour is at once a history and a prophecy. The extent to which the deliberations and utterances of this congress may regulate the development of society or give impulse to succeeding generations, it is impossible to estimate, but not unreasonable to anticipate. The plans of the congress matured in the minds of the best scholars; the classification of its purpose, the scope, the selection of its distinguished participants, gave to the hopes and ambitions of the management of the Exposition inspiration of a most exalted degree. At first these ambitions were--not without reason--regarded as too high. The plane upon which the congress had been inaugurated, the aim, the broad intent, seemed beyond the merits, if not beyond the capacity, of this hitherto not widely recognized intellectual centre. But the courage of the inception, the loftiness of the purpose, appealed so profoundly to the toilers for truth and the apostles of fact, that we find gathered here to-day in the heart of the new Western continent the great minds whose impress on society has rendered possible the intellectual heights to which this age has ascended and now beckon forward the students of the world to limitless possibilities.