PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 491 
Every local scientific society should be a training ground for these Sir Gala- 
hads, and an outpost of the empire of knowledge. The community should look to 
it for protection from dangers within and without the settlement, and for 
assistance in pressing further forward into the surrounding woods of obscurity. 
At present it is unusual for this civic responsibility to be accepted by a 
scientific society, with the result that local movements are undertaken without 
the guidance necessary to make them successful. A local scientific society 
should be the natural body for the civic authority to consult before any action 
is taken in whieh scientific knowledge will be of service. It should be to 
the city or county in which it is situated what the Royal Society is to the 
State, and not a thing apart from public life and affairs. As an example 
of what a local society may usefully do, the action taken by the Manchester 
Field Naturalists’ and Archzologists’ Society several years ago may be men- 
tioned. The Society appointed a Committee for the purpose of promoting the 
planting of trees and shrubs in Manchester and its immediate suburbs. The 
idea commended itself to the Corporation, and the Committee obtained advice 
as to the best trees for open spaces in the district, shrubs for tubs and boxes, 
and tree culture in towns generally. This is the kind of guidance which 
a scientific society should be particularly competent to give, and which the 
community has a right to expect from it. Many similar questions continually 
arise in which ascertained knowledge can be used for the promotion of healthy 
individual and social life, and if scientific societies are indifferent to them 
they neglect their best opportunities of playing a strong part in the scheme 
of human progress. 
When wisdom is justified of her children, and local scientific societies are 
no longer esoteric circles, but effective groups of enlightened citizens of all 
classes, they will provide the touchstone by which fact is distinguished from 
assertion and promise from performance. As the sun draws into our system 
all substantial bodies which come within its sphere of influence, while the 
pressure of sunlight drives away the fine dust which would tend to obscure 
one body from another, so a local scientific society possesses the power of 
attracting within itself all people of weight in the region around it and of 
dispersing the mist and fog which commonly prevail in the social atmosphere. 
Thus may the forces of modern civilisation, moral and material, be brought 
together, and an allied plan of campaign instituted against the armies of 
ignorance and sloth. The service is that of truth, the discipline that of scientific 
investigation, and the unifying aim human well-being. Kingsley long ago 
expressed the democratic basis upon which this fellowship is founded. ‘If,’ 
he said, ‘you want a ground of brotherhood with men, not merely in these 
islands, but in America, on the Continent—in a word, all over the world— 
such as rank, wealth, fashion, or other artificial arrangements of the world 
cannot give and cannot take away; if you want to feel yourself as good as 
any man in theory, because you are as good as any man in practice, except 
those who are better than you in the same line, which is open to any and 
every man, if you wish to have the inspiring and ennobling feeling of being 
a brother in a great freemasonry which owns no difference of rank, of creed, 
or of nationality—the only freemasonry, the only International League which 
is likely to make mankind (as we all hope they will be some day) one—-ther: 
become men of science. Join the freemasonry in which Hugh Miller, the poor 
Cromarty stonemason, in which Michael Faraday, the poor bookbinder’s boy, 
became the companions and friends of the noblest and most learned on earth, 
looked up to by them not as equals merely, but as teachers and guides, because 
philosophers and discoverers,’ 
LL2 
