The evening for the meeting of the Science Club had arrived. Its membership had increased tenfold within a year. At its monthly meetings, which were open to the public, an audience of two hundred, old and young, was usually present--a number about three times that of the regular membership. General science was now the study of this club. At its weekly meetings, which only members attended, the studies of specific topics by individuals, oftentimes illustrated by experiments, were reported. These meetings were held in one of my laboratories, while the open monthly meeting was always held in my lecture room, with some rather famous speakers to instruct the audience. An enthusiastic friend of science had given a fund with the stipulation that we should engage the services of those who both knew their subjects and had acquired the art of presentation. The fund was $10,000 and it yielded $500 a year. I think beyond question it was doing more for science than any other fund of ten times that amount which can be mentioned. On the particular evening of which I am about to speak, the lecturer told the members of the Science Club frankly how, beginning at the age of thirteen, he had spent forty years of _enjoyment in study_, that he had always found great satisfaction in the study of ancient civilizations and literatures. He had been fortunate, he said, in having teachers early in life who could make these subjects full of meaning to him. His greatest satisfaction, however, during the last twenty-five years had been found in tracing the development of modern science, both in the evolution of its theories and in its applications to modern industries. He said he was sure that young people of high-school age would find it profitable to learn, for instance, how the modern theory of combustion had developed slowly through the centuries, even if to do so they must curtail somewhat their study of how Greece and Rome developed and declined. He said that science furnished a tremendously rich field of study for young people, which as yet had been untouched by our schools, first, because educational conservatism had made it impossible to determine the relative importance of subjects of study, and, second, because education in science had, for a brief period, found its worst enemies within its own camp. He would like especially to commend on this evening some historical studies in science, and had chosen for his subject, "How the Idea of a Universal Ether Developed." Men seem to talk freely now about the transmission of light, heat, and electricity by means of the _ether_. How did this idea arise? Is it a product of wild imagination? or did the idea develop out of experiences which, if given to any person of fair intelligence, would yield the same result?