CONFERENCE OF DELEGATES 
OF CORRESPONDING SOCIETIES. 
SOUTHAMPTON, 1925. 
The Conference met in King Edward VI Grammar School, Southampton, on 
Thursday, August 27, at 2 p.m., Sir Daniel Hall, K.C.B., F.R.S., President, in the 
chair. Thirty-two delegates were present, representing thirty-seven societies. 
The President delivered the following address :— 
On Corresponding Societies and the Schools. 
In addressing the representatives of the Corresponding Societies here assembled, 
perhaps I may be allowed to direct your attention to some questions which have not, 
as a Tule, fallen within the purview of your Societies, but with which I am personally 
very intimately concerned. I refer particularly to agriculture, and more specially to 
certain educational developments in connection with it, because I should like to take 
this opportunity of trying to enlist the assistance both of individuals and of societies. 
No one who is in touch with English life can fail to be aware of the amount of 
devoted work which is latent in the many societies existing in this country and dealing 
with such subjects as Natural History and Archeology, yet the opportunities for 
work in these directions may be said to be growing less and less. 
Our fauna and our flora have been very fully explored, and the possibilities of an 
individual making any original contribution to knowledge in these directions cannot 
be other than rare and accidental. 
Scientific research is growing steadily more remote from the ordinary man, and 
more and more dependent upon the resources of an organised laboratory. It is the 
pride of scientific research in Great Britain that many of the most notable con- 
tributions have been made by amateurs, yet the inevitable trend of events is making 
it increasingly difficult for the non-professional man to establish himself in the fields 
even of Botany and Zoology. 
Again, the main lines of archeological research in this country have been explored, 
although much patient observation yet remains to be carried out and gathered 
together by the societies in order to put the pre-history of Britain upon a scientific 
basis. Here again opportunities for men with a taste for personal investigation are 
becoming limited. 
I want to indicate a direction in which valuable work of a local character can still 
be done. This is, briefly, the recovery before it is too late of the detailed agricultural 
history of the country with a view to rendering it available for the purposes of 
education. ® 
There is a very general feeling held that our country schools, whether they be 
the elementary school or the country grammar school, ought to do something to 
use their environment in their education and not base it exclusively upon urban needs 
and the urban outlook. Educationally, we never seem to think of the land, and yet 
a very considerable proportion of our population still goes upon the land either here or 
in the Dominions, and a much larger proportion of the boys educated in country schools 
take service in some of the businesses or professions dependent upon the land, so that 
they would be the better for learning at school some understanding of and sympathy 
with the work of the farm. I am not for amoment claiming that our schools, even those 
situated in the country, should give a vocational training calculated to turn out farmers 
or farm labourers; I am simply holding a brief for a form of education that makes 
use of the surroundings of the rural school as instruments of education whereby the 
instruction is made real and the school is linked on to the life of the district. 
Again, I regard it as a matter of some importance that every boy in a rural school, 
elementary or secondary, should arrive at some appreciation of the fact that our 
landed system and our farming is a matter of growth, which has its roots far back in 
the past and represents an ordered development in response to the physical and 
economic environment. Let me give you an instance of what I mean. I should like 
to see on the walls of every village school a series of parish maps. There would, 
first of all, be the normal cadastral map, the Ordnance Survey on the 1-inch or 6-inch 
scale, on which antiquities and any connections with wider history are specially 
indicated. Alongside this map should be a geological map, the Drift Edition if 
available, with some manuscript indications of the variations of soil as far as they are 
