176 T. C. WHITE ON PAPERS FOR THE CLUB. 



cull objects of beauty or of interest, which often lead him so far 

 from the path that he loses himself in the bewilderments of desul- 

 tory collection and dilettanteism. If this should be the ending, the 

 wondrous perfection of our instruments is wasted — one might al- 

 most say prostituted — and they become as expensive but worthless 

 toys. Such work can leave a world no better than it found it. A 

 life spent in such pursuits cannot leave its mark behind it ; it is 

 the style of the butterfly, not of the bee. I would suggest, there- 

 fore, that each member, according to his taste, should select one or 

 two subjects for especial investigation ; let him truthfully and im- 

 partially follow it out, carefully recording every change, and if pos- 

 sible making faithful drawings of every change. The collecting of 

 a cabinet of slides is only of secondary importance to a faithful 

 drawing from a recent specimen, for slides, mount them as you will, 

 must undergo change, and that change, however slight, detracts 

 from the truth of the subject ; and who shall say how important a 

 clue we may lose in unravelling the delicate life history of a tissue, 

 for instance, by reason of contraction or expansion, by coagulation 

 or dissolution in the media employed to mount it. Work under- 

 taken in this manner, would do more in a short time to 

 advance the position of the Club than any inflated notions 

 or wishes to rank as a scientific society, if such are enter- 

 tained. We have the reputation of being a hard working and 

 practical society ; let us add to this a systematic course of work, 

 and then, if the departed spirits take an interest in things on earth, 

 there is one who will rejoice in the army that is named after him. 

 How, what form should the papers assume ? Their style need not be 

 laborious, but a plain, simple statement of facts, taking care that 

 any doubts in the writer's mind are freely confessed, for by this 

 means discussion will be provoked, and the contact of minds will do 

 much to elicit the truth by the thorough ventilation the subject will 

 undergo. Papers such as these will always be welcome, not that 

 papers full of laborious and exhaustive research would be excluded. 

 These would be the exception, and not the rule. Ask the 

 authors of those exhaustive treatises that we have had read 

 here, and they will bear out my assertion that they were not their 

 first productions. Such a paper as " The Geographical Distri- 

 bution of Mosses," or that on " Microscopic Moulds," and others 

 read here,' were the results of long and systematic work; yet one 

 of those gentlemen, in the earlier days of the Club, gave a simple 



