hundred years ago; and this amelioration of our condition, and the more general diffusion of knowledge, have been accompanied by a vast improvement in morality. The ceremonies of to-day are worthy of the great naturalist whose birth they commemorate. Societies and institutions all over the world join with us in honoring him, and are represented here by delegates, or have transmitted documents expressing their appreciation of his life and labors. The public natural science institutions of New York have come to take leading parts in the subjects they teach and illustrate. Public and private philanthropy have developed them with a rapidity almost phenomenal, for they are all yet in their infancy and on a scale commensurate with the dignity of the metropolis of America. The cordial co-operation of a municipality with public-spirited citizens to build and maintain such institutions for the welfare of the people and of science, finds here in New York its maximum evolution, which has as yet, however, by no means reached its complete development or its maximum usefulness. What will be said of their position and importance when after fifty years the New York Historical Society opens the tablet which we now place upon this bridge? And what discoveries will science have made for the benefit of the human race during this next fifty years? The selection of this bridge, recently constructed by the Park Department, as a permanent memorial of Linnæus, is most appropriate. It is situated just outside the New York Zoological Park, with the New York Botanical Garden a short distance to the north, being thus between the two institutions which teach the subjects on which the fame of Linnæus chiefly rests. The suggestion that it be known hereafter as the Linnæan Bridge came from the Director of the American Museum of Natural History. On behalf of the New York Academy of Sciences I now unveil this tablet, and present it to the city of New York, there having been placed in it copies of to-day's program and other documents befitting the occasion. After Wennerberg's song, rendered by the American Union of Swedish Singers, "Hear us, Svea," Hon. Joseph I. Berry, Commissioner of Parks of the Borough of the Bronx, in a few fitting words accepted the tablet on behalf of the city of New York, and then delivered the key of the box within the tablet to the New York Historical Society, for preservation till May 23, 1957. These ceremonies were followed by the singing, by the chorus, of Lindblad's "Battle Hymn," and then the audience listened to the following two addresses. ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN SCENIC AND HISTORIC PRESERVATION SOCIETY. GEORGE F. KUNZ, PH. D. Linnæus was a great scientist, and the conquests of science have done more to advance the world than wars, which science may yet render impossible. It was thirty years of scientific research in Germany that gave us artificial indigo. It was pure scientific research that led Moissan, Cowles and Acheson to discover independently an abrasive substance of a hardness between the diamond and the sapphire; and then Moissan by scientific deduction worked out the genesis of the hardest and most fearless of gems, which, though obtained only in the form of powder, was still the diamond. Within the past quarter of a century we have seen air, oxygen and hydrogen liquefied, giving us temperatures absolutely unknown in nature before, and also the electric furnace, giving an extreme heat such as has perhaps never existed, unless it be on the surface of the sun. Jade, the Chinese stone, has been known in China for more than a thousand years. Some believe that it was known to a prehistoric race the existence of which was almost unknown to the Chinese, and whose only records extant are found as we find the evidences left of the mound-builders, who passed away before the advent of the white man in North America. It was not until 1866 that Damour, a scientist, separated jade into two distinct minerals, nephrite and jadeite; and one of those into two varieties, jadeite and chloromelanite-facts unknown to the Chinese, though they apparently knew and understood every tiny fragment they had ever seen of this mineral. It was the scientist who took three red stones belonging to the King of Burmah or to the Emperor of China, and proved to him that one was a ruby, one was a spinel, and the third a tourmaline, and not all rubies, as they had been regarded for a century or more previously. Moses was the first great systematizer, and his original assemblage of the people in tens, hundreds and thousands, is carried out in the military systems of to-day, and is again reflected in our own and in the monetary systems of many of the European nations, and more especially in that indispensable and scientific international system of weights and measures, the metric system. It was Alexander who conquered the eastern world, bringing back with him much refinement, and possibly also the valuable and industrious silkworm; and it was he also who discovered that the carrying powers of his camels were doubled if he employed a gold medium of exchange instead of silver. Cæsar, in his attempt to conquer the world, did much toward the dissemination of education and civilization, from which Rome greatly benefited. Napoleon upturned and readjusted the treasuries of a number of kingdoms, duchies, cloisters and churches in Europe; and, even though his régime was attended by frightful loss of life, marked and permanent improvement has followed it. But it was La Sage, a scientist, who compiled a great work for Napoleon, from which he learned what noble families had lived in all times, and what campaigns had been fought by the various conquerors; and it was a thorough study of La Sage's work that had much to do with giving Napoleon an idea as to what worlds others had conquered, and what parts of this world were left for him to subdue. It may not be generally known that it was one of our New York scientists, Dr. Melvil Dewey, who introduced the card catalogue system of cataloguing books, which led to the present system of keeping books by the looseleaf system. It would be easy to mention many who have materially assisted in the advancement and organization of the multifarious affairs of mankind; but the other and lower creations of nature outnumbered mankind many thousand times, and the co-ordination of scientific nomenclature covering this vast domain is due to the great Carl von Linné. Until his time, an animal was known as a deer in English, a Hirsh in German, a cerf in French, and by fifty other names in as many different languages. By applying two or three words as a name to every creature that flies in the heavens above, that dwells in the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth, he made it possible for the scientist, whether at the Cape of Good Hope, in Greenland, in New York, or in the Sandwich Islands, to know not only just what living form was referred to, but also to understand immediately to just what genus, class, species or variety, this living organism belongs. The Linnæan system has also greatly aided scientific classification in natural history, which, in connection with medicine, has given us the connecting link in the science of biology and bacteriology. The Linnæan system compares with the natural history of to-day as alchemy does with chemistry, as astrology and fortune-telling with astronomy and medicine of the present time. It is strange that, as well-planned and admirable and successful as the Linnæan system is when applied to the nomenclature of animate objects, it was absolutely rejected by the then mineralogists and chemists, as the chemical equivalents and the structure are frequently better expressed by a single term than they would be by a binominal system. Had a Linnæan system existed when Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, there would be no dispute to-day as to whether the "apple" which |