union of the Descendants

of John Tower and

The Annual Meeting of the Tower Genealogical Society (Inc.) at

Hingham, Massachusetts, June 17, 18 and 19, 1910.

WHY SO LATE?

The expenses of the great Ter-centenary Reunion and the ample Report that was issued to you last year were largely borne by a few individuals to whom this cause is most dear. As your President has well said, it was a labor of love and honor to our Fathers.

The organization of the Tower Genealogical Society was the one great result of the first Reunion, and on its shoulders fell the responsibility of promoting the second Reunion.

This second Reunion was held under the guidance of your Society, but the expense thereof left our treasury without sufficient funds to issue a Report.

After some deliberation among the Officers and as a result of two meetings of your Executive Board, sufficient funds were donated to guarantee the expenses of this Report.

We trust you will pardon the unavoidable delay and enjoy this Report all the more for the waiting.

WALTER LAMONT TOWER,

JAMES WALLACE TOWER,
Committee on 1910 Report.

Issued this 1st day of April, 1911, by order of the Executive Board of the Tower Genealogical Society (Inc.)

FORM 6.

INTRODUCTORY.

SOME MERE IDEAS.

Once upon a time there dwelt in the fertile imagination of that great satirist, Dean Swift, a most remarkable people, the Laputans, whose leading peculiarity was their abstraction from the practical concerns of life. Immersed in speculation, their brains teeming with mighty problems, this strangely gifted race was dead to the present world and the trivial interests which engage the attention of most men. The state of the sun and its probable influence upon the earth, or, as they said, "the sun's health," were matters of more moment than their neighbors', and their tailors, who were experienced mathematicians, took their measurements by quadrant, rule and compass, regardless of the trifling circumstance that the clothes seldom fit.

To relieve the embarrassment, not infrequently caused by this inattention to practical affairs, persons of quality had about them "Flappers." who, at the psychological moment, would gently strike with bladders, containing small pebbles, the eyes, ears or mouth of their masters, as occasion required, thus recalling them to a sense of their living relations with other men and the necessity for speaking or bearing about the commoner matters of life.

Times have changed let us hope for the better since the wise churchman lived and wrote, and the Dean's irony would be pointless now. Industry we wisely rate above mere ideas. Practical science and invention have a higher commercial value than mere speculation. Acquisition is deemed the most thoughtful provision for the future, and material comforts are more soothing than chimerical visions. We delight in action, in things done." that take the eye and have the price.

But there are other things to value, as proof whereof you have yourselves formed a Genealogical Society. And we, your representatives, in Executive Board assembled, assume the humble office of Flapper and strike your eyes with occasional literature as a reminder of really important life-interests, which are too frequently sidetracked in the onrush of our present "practical age." We do not wish to sermonize for we have good preachers in our family circle who can perform that function to your greater satisfaction. Nor can we talk long with you, for our space, like our money, is limited, the one because of the other. We are poor in everything but ideas, yet these may provide a working basis, if you will contribute your quota and with us mold them to our common advantage.

For we intend that the Tower Genealogical Society shall fill a niche in your life into which no other organization will precisely fit. You have your church, your lodge, your club, your other forms of social amusement. All these satisfy in part your craving for action and change and life, and drain off in a measure the surplus mentality which remains after business hours. But unless you Towers differ from the general run of people in our time you are still a bit dissatisfied, just because, as you may have heard some one say, you are a manor a woman. (For after beholding with our own eyes our fair cousins on two noteworthy occasions we are disposed to address the burden of our discourse to you. Haply you may see, and guide us of the duller understanding.)

Well, as we hinted above, the pioneer has gone, not, happily, altogether and in all senses, but, speaking quite generally, it has passed from our view. And gone with it to their reward are the men who thought and acted for the mere joy of thinking and acting, the men who followed forlorn hopes and traversed unknown continents of land and spirit. There are ideas in plenty now, O yes, never more than at present. But for the most part they are of the steamariven, high-gear, ball-bearing, automatic kind that we accept only with a guarantee that they will fit in with the rest of our life-gear and work to our material profit. The last really good one we remember to have heard about happened along some fifty years ago, and it cost a nation blood and treasure to work it out, for mere ideas are almost always expensive. Don't you believe all this? Then write to us about it. Opposition, if founded on good faith, is the firm path to the highway leading to harmony and achievement.

And you know, of course, to what we refer? The seventeenth century; yes, and a slice of the sixteenth- the age which cradled Robert Tower in Old Hingham (?) we wonder now if it were there and schooled young John in the "mere ideas" to which we owe how much.

And the time was a perfect nursery of ideas, you remember. Step up and name your calling, and we will furnish you with the birth-certificate of the genius without whom your vocation would have been all but impossible. Are you a physician, for instance? Rumors of John Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood (1626) may have reached the ears of John Tower before ever he left England to make a home for ourselves and for his idea, whatever it was. Are you an astronomer, a "star-gazer"? Johann Kepler — which, being interpreted, is John - died (1630) shortly before he started. Is preaching your profession? The sombre fancy of blind John Milton was painting the grim theology in which even your father may have believed. As likely as not you are in the insurance business. At about the same time, then (1662), John Graunt was presenting to the Royal Society his Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills of Mortality" and preparing the way for the statistical studies which mean so much in your calling. Why we need hardly leave the name of John to find them! But there was Robert Boyle, if you are a chemist, and if mechanics interests you, why Sir Isaac Newton was laying the foundations upon which your applied science rests, while John was building his house-fortress in New Hingham. Perhaps, finally, you are one of our fair readers, and afflicted no doubt with "nerves." Well, Descartes had begun to examine these "little white threads" in his dissecting room, and, being a Jack-at-all-trades and surpassingly good at all, was incidentally inventing his analytical geometry which you, who are possibly a school teacher, know something about. To the more enlightened, even in far-away Sandy Cove, these things and the like may have been known by vague report, and were of more startling import than the latest aeroplane passenger record is to us. But if our ancestor had small time and scant knowledge for these things it matters little. The same age the age of Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus, of Cromwell and Richelieu and the Grand Monarch with his glittering court the age of the Thirty Years' War and the Civil War the age of men who would as lieve fight for an idea as battle for a throne, a little rather, we suspect this it was that nourished him and bore on the wings of the strong east wind faith in mere ideas.