heir shoulders, or in
the civil field, captains of industry, clad in the glittering armor of a
big business reputation.

Nowadays one cannot be a scholar in general. One has to have some
specialty. As to what that specialty shall be in terms of usefulness to
the community, I think I have given you examples enough to show that the
range is almost unlimited. I had planned to sum up this by a brief
record of the discovery and application to war purposes of helium; but I
find that one of my own students in Columbia College, now a member of
the Geological Survey, has beaten me out; and you can find the whole
story in the May issue of the _National Geographic Magazine_. I cannot
resist, however, a summary of the steps. First, the astronomer, just
about the time this chapter was established, finds a new line in the
solar spectrum. Thirty years later, the geologist comes upon an unusual
stone and turns to a great chemist for its analysis, with the consequent
recognition of helium as a mundane element. About the same time comes
its identification as one of the newly recognized ingredients of the
air, and the study of its properties. Then a Kansas chemist discovers
its presence in some natural gas about which he was consulted because it
would not burn properly. Then comes the war with its incendiary bullet
and the need of a non-inflammable content for balloons and dirigibles.
Then the cooperation of physicist, engineer, and geologist--Canadian and
American--makes helium available for this purpose. Before these
researches helium cost $1700 a cubic foot and was obtainable only in
Germany. The present price is 10 cents a cubic foot, and it is falling.
The importance of all this for peace is very great. In these days of
airplane hops we are forgetting that a Zeppelin made the trip from
Bulgaria to what should have been German East Africa with medicines and
ammunition. The Germans having disappeared in the meantime, the Zeppelin
turned around and came back, making a continuous voyage of several
thousand miles.

But do not forget that not all scholars made good in the great test. Let
me sum up what I have already said. In the first place, to be useful the
scholarship must be sound. The near-scholar, the man who took the
short-cut in preparation, proved to be a positive danger. The mere
expert in some narrow field, the man who did not realize the
implications of what he knew, was relatively useless. A man to succeed
had to be intense