So much does the mere scratch of science enhance the virtue of a stone! Now add to your science history. Instead of the scratch of a glacier, let it be a chisel and a human hand, and let the marks be--“1620.” Now read--if you can read and understand. I copy it verbatim from a Freshman college theme: PLYMOUTH ROCK Plymouth Rock is situated in Plymouth Mass. It is the rock upon which the Mayflower landed in 1620. But it is not now where it was then. It was moved many years ago up to the street. And when they moved it it broke. But they cemented it together. It is four or five feet long; and three or four feet wide; and it is inscribed with the famous figures 1620, to celebrate the landing of the Puritans at that time. It is enclosed within a canopy of stone and an iron fence; but the gate is hardly ever closed. There are a great many famous stones in the world but this is as famous as any. My mother was visiting me. She is a self-contained old Quaker, and this was the second time in all of her eighty years that she had even seen New England! What should we do first? What did she most desire to see? “Take me to see Plymouth Rock first,” she said; and we were off, mother as excited and as lively as a girl. As we entered Plymouth, however, I noticed that mother had grown silent, and that her doctor-daughter, beside her on the back seat, always sensitive to her moods, was also silent. We descended the hill to the harbor, came on in sight of the canopy over the Rock, and slowed down to stop. But the car had not stopped, when mother, the back door open, her foot on the running-board, was stepping off and through the open gate, where, falling on her knees, with tears running down her face, she kissed the blessed stone, her daughter calling, “O Mother, the germs! the germs!” When Science and Religion thus clash, Science must give way. Mother knew as much about germs as her doctor-daughter. She had lived longer than her daughter; she had lost more, and had loved more--some things more than life itself. Science has marked every rock; but only those that are wet with such tears and kissed with such lips are ripe for sermon and song. These are the eyes and these the lips of those, who, passing through Bacca, make it a well. Knowledge alone, though it course the very heavens, will come back to earth without so much as one shining fleck of stardust in its hair. The other day a great astronomer was delivering a lecture in Boston on the stars. Wonder and awe held the audience as it traveled the stellar spaces with the help of the astounding pictures on the screen. The emotion was deep; the tension almost painful as the lecturer swept on and on through the unthinkable vast, when, coming to his close, he turned and asked lightly, “Now, what do you think of immortality? Is it anything more than the neurotic hope of a very insignificant mote in this immensity?”