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ures, antiquities, and natural history specimens. We have lost 

 the inimitable pictures of De Wint, the Franklin rehcs, and 

 many other things which ought not to have left the county. 



A word on our own individual and special duties as natural- 

 ists, and here I cannot do better than quote the words of a late 

 Bishop of Oxford — the great Bishop Wilberforce. He says : — 



" A good practical naturalist must be a good observer ; and 

 how many qualities are required to make up a good observer ? 

 Attention, patience, quickness to seize separate facts, discrim- 

 ination to keep them unconfused, readiness to combine them, 

 and rapidity and yet slowness of induction ; above all, perfect 

 fidelity, which can be seduced neither by the enticements of a 

 favourite theory nor by the temptation to see a little more than 

 actually happens in some passing drama." 



In conclusion, it is gratifying to find that there is at least an 

 awakening and uprising on these matters in Lincolnshire, and 

 that the dry bones are moving. Let us trust that this union — 

 a real Union of hearts — will inaugurate a new era. The most 

 wonderful fact in connection with the last half century has been 

 the progress of science. Everywhere amongst the educated and 

 thoughtful there is a striving to search and probe downwards 

 into the very sources and origin of all life — not alone that we 

 may get a deeper insight into the workings of nature, but to find 

 the key to our own position in connection with the life which is 

 everywhere about us. Men of science are diligently engaged in 

 painfully searching backwards into the infinity of the past, and, 

 considering the results already attained, I think we can look for- 

 ward with hope to the infinity of the future. Yet, 1 think, when 

 science has spoken her last word, we shall still have to confess, 

 in the words of Lincolnshire's noblest son, we are but 



"An infant crying in the night : 



An infant crying for the light : 



And with no language but a cry." 



