That the interest thus shown is not confined to the hundreds of attendants, but must be shared by your great public, is shown by the unfailing barometer of journalism. Here we have a field in which the non-survival of the unfit is the rule in its most ruthless form. The journals that we see and read are merely the fortunate few of a countless number, dead and forgotten, that did not know what the public wanted to read about. The eagerness shown by the representatives of your press in recording everything your guests would say was accomplished by an enterprise in making known everything that occurred, and, in case of an emergency requiring a heroic measure, what did NOT occur, showing that smart journalists of the East must have learned their trade, or at least breathed their inspiration, in these regions. I think it was some twenty years since I told a European friend that the eighth wonder of the world was a Chicago daily newspaper. Since that time the course of journalistic enterprise has been in the reverse direction to that of the course of empire, eastward instead of westward. It has been sometimes said--wrongfully, I think--that scientific men form a mutual admiration society. One feature of the occasion made me feel that we, your guests, ought then and there to have organized such a society and forthwith proceeded to business. This feature consisted in the conferences on almost every branch of astronomy by which the celebration of yesterday was preceded. The fact that beyond the acceptance of a graceful compliment I contributed nothing to these conferences relieves me from the charge of bias or self-assertion in saying that they gave me a new and most inspiring view of the energy now being expended in research by the younger generation of astronomers. All the experience of the past leads us to believe that this energy will reap the reward which nature always bestows upon those who seek her acquaintance from unselfish motives. In one way it might appear that little was to be learned from a meeting like that of the present week. Each astronomer may know by publications pertaining to the science what all the others are doing. But knowledge obtained in this way has a sort of abstractness about it a little like our knowledge of the progress of civilization in Japan, or of the great extent of the Australian continent. It was, therefore, a most happy thought on the part of your authorities to bring together the largest possible number of visiting astronomers from Europe, as well as America, in order that each might see, through the attrition of personal contact, what progress the others were making in their researches. To the visitors at least I am sure that the result of this meeting has been extremely gratifying. They earnestly hope, one and all, that the callers of the conference will not themselves be more disappointed in its results; that, however little they may have actually to learn of methods and results, they will feel stimulated to