The St. Louis World's Fair promised, through the vast extent of its grounds, through the beautiful plans of the buildings, through the eagerness of the United States, through the participation of all countries on earth, and through the gigantic outlines of the internal plans, to become the most monumental expression of the energies with which the twentieth century entered on its course. Commerce and industry, art and social work, politics and education, war and peace, country and city. Orient and Occident, were all to be focussed for a few summer months in the ivory city of the Mississippi Valley. It seemed most natural that science and productive scholarship should also find its characteristic place among the factors of our modern civilization. Of course the scientist had his word to say on almost every square foot of the Exposition. Whether the building was devoted to electricity or to chemistry, to anthropology or to metallurgy, to civic administration or to medicine, to transportation or to industrial arts, it was everywhere the work of the scientist which was to win the triumph; and the Palace of Education, the first in any universal exposition, was to combine under its roof not only the school work of all countries, but the visible record of the world's universities and technical schools as well. And yet it seemed not enough to gather the products and records of science and to make science serve with its tools and inventions. Modern art, too, was to reign over every hall and to beautify every palace, and yet demanded its own unfolding in the gallery of paintings and sculptures. In the same way it was not enough for science to penetrate a hundred exhibitions and turn the wheels in every hall, but it must also seek to concentrate all its energies in one spot and show the cross-section of human knowledge in our time, and, above all, its own methods. An exhibition of scholarship cannot be arranged for the eyes. The great work which grows day by day in quiet libraries and laboratories, and on a thousand university platforms, can express itself only through words. Yet heaped up printed volumes would be dead to a World's Fair spectator; how to make such words living was the problem. Above all, scholarship does not really exhibit its methods, if it does not show itself in production. It is no longer scholarship which speaks of a truth-seeking that has been performed instead of going on with the search for further truth. If the world's science was to be exhibited, a form had to be sought in which the scholarly work on the spot would serve the ideals of knowledge, would add to the storehouse of truth, and would thus work in the service of human progress at the same moment in which it contributed to the completeness of the exhibition.