244 MY LIFE AS A NATURALIST 



two pages), Geological Map, L'Entente Cordiale, Defence, Soldiers 

 and Sailors, Star Notes and Map, Music and Words for Grace 

 and Evening Hymn, Canterbury Tales, Register of Marks ob- 

 tained, blank page for Report, Index, and, finally, a series of 

 Short Lessons delivered on such diverse subjects as Martello 

 Towers and Sea Birds, the Heavens and the Channel Tunnel, 

 Canterbury Tales and Seaweeds, Farm Life and Hermit Crabs. 



The benediction is appropriately devoted to " Our Friends " 

 who assisted in making this memorable expedition possible, and 

 what Kentish Town Road and other schools have accomplished 

 at Folkestone, and elsewhere, can be undertaken by many other 

 schools in their own districts as an aid to the New Domesday of 

 which I am a faithful disciple and enthusiastic advocate. 



The zeal for conservation of objects and records is increasing 

 all over the world in every centre of civilisation, as Mr Bruce 

 Cummings points out in an illuminating essay, entitled " The 

 Art of Perpetuation," in " Science Progress " (April 1917). All 

 this is on the right lines, and I have given prominence to the 

 exploits of the schoolboys of Kentish Town Road because I am 

 impressed with the supreme importance of enlisting the sympathy, 

 and support, of young people in this survey of their own country. 

 Such original work is an education of itself, and no objection 

 should be raised to this outdoor survey by the authorities, though, 

 as we know from bitter experience, how slow they are to move, 

 and how progress is often impeded. 



Science, which, after all, is well-organised common sense, as 

 Huxley expressed it, will be recognised more than ever in the 

 days to come, and it is as well to lay our plans ahead in the hope 

 that, when the time arrives, those of us who are destined to play 

 an important part in this regional survey work may not be found 

 wanting. 



Cummings says that " Conservation is a natural tendency of 

 the mind. One might lay down a certain law of the conservation 

 of consciousness to indicate our extreme repugnance to the 

 idea of anything passing clean away into the void. What in- 

 sinuating comfort in those words that every hair of our heads 

 is numbered ! " And, later on, he says : " Every man, willy- 

 nilly, collects and preserves, for his consciousness is, of itself, an 

 automatic collecting instrument, and his memory a preservative. 

 After a life of it, a man's mind is a museum, a palimpsest, a hold- 

 all." But it is up to all of us who have thus conserved, to per- 

 petuate our store of knowledge, for it is within my own (and 



