CONFERENCE OF DELEGATES OF CORRESPONDING SOCIETIES. 



REGIONAL SURVEYS AND SCIENTIFIC 



SOCIETIES. 



ADDRESS BY 



SIR JOHN RUSSELL, F.R.S., 



PRESIDENT OP THE CONFERENCE. 



It is characteristic of this country that some among its men and women 

 of affairs have always taken an active interest in science. Elsewhere it 

 is common enough to find the passive interest of receptive listeners prepared 

 to hear any new thing. But here people occupied in business, professional 

 or social pursuits, have themselves practised science : they have worked 

 in laboratories or studied in the field, intent on doing something. In 

 every science some of the great pioneers have been amateurs working at 

 the subject because they loved it. Priestley is a good illustration : he 

 expresses himself in no uncertain way as to the status of the amateur. 

 ' The study of electricity,' he says, ' requires no great stock of particular 

 preparatory knowledge ; so that any person that is tolerably well versed 

 in experimental philosophy may presently be upon a level with the most 

 experienced electricians . . . several raw adventurers have made them- 

 selves as considerable, as some who have been, in other respects, the 

 greatest philosophers. I need not tell my readers of how great weight 

 this consideration is to induce him to provide himself with an electrical 

 apparatus.' It was an age when the professional worker was somewhat 

 at a discount and he remained so for many years ; in none of Dickens's 

 books, as Quiller Couch reminds us, is the professional man anything more 

 than an incompetent bungler lacking common sense and sometimes also 

 common honesty. 



With the exhaustion of the surface workings of science more systematic 

 investigations became necessary. The amateur with a few shillings' worth 

 of apparatus was no longer able ' to make himself as considerable ' as 

 people with long specialised training, working in well-equipped laboratories. 

 He still survived, but in the degenerate form depicted in Charles Keene's 

 ' Uncle Fusby ' in the early days of ' Punch ' ; his societies lasted into our 

 own time. I remember as a child being taken to one of their meetings in 

 a provincial town where the mysteries of ' galvanism ' were being dis- 

 played by a gentleman who also discoursed on geology, biology, astronomy 

 and other sciences : ' The Infinitely Great and The Infinitely Little,' to 

 borrow a phrase of the period. But this is all past ; the type goes on for 

 ever, but it now studies more occult subjects far transcending the bounds 

 of physical and biological science. 



The amateur who is prepared to take trouble still has his place, however, 

 in the advancement of knowledge. In the observational sciences — botany, 



