286 NATURAL SCIENCE. November, 



The Organisation of Sections at the British Association. 



We do not know whether it was its President's eloquent plea for 

 minute detail that affected the work of the Geological Section at 

 Liverpool, but certainly it was as detailed, and consequently as dry, 

 as the most Precambrian of fossils could wish. The ordinary 

 person does not feel strongly impelled to hear a disquisition on 

 " Two Examples of Current Bedding in Clay," or on " Quartzite 

 Lenticles in the Schists of S.E. Anglesey." Even certain papers 

 that did attract us by their titles, such as " The Depths of the 

 Sea in Past Epochs " and " The Conditions under which the Upper 

 Chalk was deposited," proved when we heard them to be for the most 

 part repetitions of matter that we had already seen in print many 

 years ago, and that, if their authors escape injury, we do not despair 

 of seeing in print again as many years hence. But we should not 

 like it to be inferred that other Sections were much better. " Fever 

 in Mice " did, it is true, attract the ladies to the Physiological Section, 

 only to disappoint them with long statistics of temperature. No one, 

 however, can have been drawn to hear of the Action of Pilocarpine 

 on the Eosinophile Granules of the Leucocytes, in the same Section ; 

 or, except for the sake of securing a good place to hear Mr. Francis 

 Darwin later in the day, can many have been induced to attend the 

 Botanical Section at 10.30 to be told about the Arrangement of the 

 Vascular Bundles in certain Nymphaeaceae. 



Of course, the wise man does liot go to hear these papers : he 

 knows that many of them are read for the sake of self-advertisement, 

 and that any which are of value will soon be accessible through the 

 ordinary channels of publication. For all that, it seems well to pro- 

 test, if only in the hope that our words may reach the Canadian 

 cousins who are preparing so splendid a welcome for the Association 

 next year. These papers not merely clog the work of the Sections, 

 but they have an effect directly contrary to the main object of the 

 Association. Some, perhaps, read by local naturalists, or descriptive 

 of local phenomena to which the attention of visitors should be 

 directed, are not to be discouraged, but the rest both frighten away 

 the people whom the Association wishes to attract, and, what we feel 

 to be of more importance, tend to split the scientific visitors them- 

 selves still further among sections. The Association should rise 

 above the specialism of most of our learned societies ; it should offer 

 a field where the zoologist might confer with the botanist, where 

 both might exchange experiences with the geologist, and where all 

 three might pick up something of use to them from the physicist and 

 chemist, who in their turn need not go the poorer away. Let there 

 be more discussions on matters of general interest, and let them be 

 thrown open to even more sections. Why, for instance, should the 

 discussion on Neo-Lamarckism have been confined to zoologists ? 

 Surely some of the physical problems that were hinted at in the dis- 

 cussion on the cell might have been laid before the physicists. 



