592 CONFERENCE OF DELEGATES 
Now this new professional status of archzology has had, and is having, 
a number of rather important reactions. In the first place, the universities 
are devoting an increasing amount of attention to it—at least seven new 
chairs and lectureships have been created since the war—and so are just 
beginning for the first time to impose a sort of academic monopoly upon 
the science. In the second place, the position of the older type of local 
society is undergoing a change by reason of the widening gulf between the 
amateur and the professional. In the third place, so long as the profession 
remains a relatively small one, it is on its part peculiarly liable to develop 
within itself an excessive narrowness and isolation—in fact, the vices of 
most restricted professionalism. 
All these are in one way or another disruptive influences. They are 
tending to divorce the archzologist from the layman whose sympathy and 
help are perhaps more necessary in this branch of knowledge than in any 
other. They are tending to divide professed archzologists themselves into 
schools which reproduce their own kind, and—of all vices the most subtly 
noxious—the new science is inclined to suffer from a kind of snobbism which 
the older sciences have largely outgrown. With the minutize of these 
dangers and diseases I am not here concerned. Something may be said, 
however, on broad lines of the attempts which are being made, or might 
profitably be made, to remedy them. 
First, let us take the broadening rift between the professional and the 
layman. Here, interest and duty agree in fixing the responsibility. The 
professional scientist, and he alone, can properly stimulate that great mass 
of lay opinion upon which not a little of his own achievement must ulti- 
mately depend, whether in the form of individual or of corporate patronage. 
On all grounds, a close liaison between professional science and the lay 
public is essential to the maintenance and development of research. 
This may sound a mere truism, but it is a truth of which three-quarters 
of professional science is unappreciative. And in re-affirming it to-day, 
I would urge it not merely from the motives of professional self-interest to 
which I have referred. I would urge it also as a salutary counter-irritant 
to one of the worst afflictions from which a closely-restricted professionalism 
can suffer. A few years ago in a presidential address at a meeting of the 
British Association, attention was drawn to the plague of pedantic verbiage 
which had infested modern science, and a plea was made for simplification 
and classification. That plea was a timely one; it might fittingly have 
been extended from professional science to such activities as professional 
football, professional cinematography and professional journalism. The 
dangers of scientific jargon are twofold ; it adds to the obscurity of science 
from the lay standpoint, and, sooner or later, it tends to obscure and obstruct 
scientific thought itself. I have just been turning over the pages of an 
excellent journal which makes it its business to present the results of 
scientific archeology to the general public, and my eye has caught three 
articles by three of the most distinguished archzologists of the day. On 
one page I am caught up in the astonishing hyphenated word ‘ leaf-shaped- 
sword-culture-complex ’ ; on another, I see the dark phrase “ the diagnostic 
value of negative lynchets’ ; on a third, the remarkable sentence, ‘ These 
names were left by the equestrian inhumators who brought in the later 
Hallstatt culture... One may perhaps suppose that the ‘ equestrian in- 
humators’ had their counterpart in such folk as ‘ pedestrian incinerators,’ 
and were the forbears of such distinguished sects as the ‘ aerial seventh-day 
Adventists ’ and the ‘ submarine Rosicrucians.’ In any case we may best 
describe this obscurantist jargon by the one simple word, Hokum. And, 
whatever may be the case in other branches of science, it is sufficiently 
