144 Address to the L.N.U. 
It is hoped that in time we shall get a museum in Lincoln.* 
The want of this has been the cause of our losing many art 
treasures, antiquities, and natural history specimens. We have 
lost the inimitable pictures of De Wint, the Franklin relics and 
many other things which ought not to have left the county. 
A word on our own individual and special duties as 
naturalists, 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, discrimina- 
tion 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 astriving to search and probe downwards into 
the very sources and origin of all life-—not alone that we may get 
a deeper insight intothe 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 forward with 
hope to the infinity of the future. Yet, I 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 buta ery.” 
*This want has now been supplied. The City and County Museum 
was opened to the public on May 22nd, 1907, 
