We Americans are proud of being called a nation of inventors; and most of us have made, or almost made, private discoveries of an inventional nature which, for some reason, have never come to fruition. The scientific boards in Washington during the war received more than sixty thousand suggestions in some mechanical field; and I am told by those who ought to know that of all these not more than five of those coming from untrained minds were of any practical value. Even from the trained minds there came, I am told, no fundamental discovery in science as a direct result of the war conditions. Suggestions of improvements in detail and valuable suggestions there were in plenty, new applications of known principles, but application of a fundamentally new idea, no. That is only to say what we already know, that discovery is not made to order. In each case the idea had already been born in the mind of some intellectual pioneer and worked out by him, and some man who had the idea in the front of his mind was at hand to apply it to the new condition. And that means, I think, that if we met the test, we met it with our scholars. When the test came, certain fields of scholarship naturally afforded a better chance for immediate service than others. The chemist, for example, had a better chance a thousand-fold than the archæologist. It is extraordinary, however, how many of the gifts which burned bright on the national altar came from men with some out-of-the-way specialty. Take archæology itself, if you will. The best trench helmet developed during the war was designed by the expert in armor from our own academic fellowship. I am told that a very important element in the length of time which it took to control the submarine menace was the fact that when war broke out the science of oceanography was almost wholly in the hands of the Germans. When the world's supply of cocoanut husks was taken up for gas masks and we still needed charcoal, we had to turn for additional sources to the tropical botanist, who might have been expected to remain reasonably undisturbed. It remained for a scholar in perhaps the purest branch of pure science, astronomy, to recognize the well known fact that it is the shape of the tail of any and every moving object, motor car or boat or what you will, and not the shape of the head, which is the factor of chief importance in design, and to apply this recognition to artillery problems. The re-designing of our artillery shells under the direction of this astronomer added miles to their range. Another astronomer applied his experience in studying the movement of comets to solving certain problems of long-range artillery fire where the projectile in its flight rises into the circumambient ether.