MEN OF SCIENCE IN LEICESTER AND LEICESTERSHIRE 99 
tinued, though not without difficulty and not throughout by the same 
lecturers, all through the war time.” 
The Report of the Council of the Society for the session 1922-23 
contained this sentence : ‘ It may now be said that the depression and 
difficulties due to the war have passed.’ 
With regard to the work of the Sections for Geology, Botany, Biology, 
Economics, and of two new *° Sections, one for Chemistry and one for 
Physics, it may after ten years be said that that sentence was not too 
optimistic. 
No attempt is here made to give particular accounts of the post-war 
work of these Sections, but something may be said of changes in or 
affecting them all. 
The different Sections seem to help one another more than in former 
years, not only by such a permanent partnership as that between the 
Sections for Zoology and Botany, but by arranging joint meetings to 
discuss overlapping subjects. Meetings also are arranged with technical 
or academical bodies, and visits are paid to places where work is carried 
on under the guidance of applied science. 
The Museum was the child of the Literary and Philosophical Society. 
After a period in which it may be said to have been first a nursling and then 
a pupil of the Society, it acquired independence not only from parental 
authority but from all parental interference. In the many years since 
this emancipation was completed there has been harmony between parent 
and child. The Museum as an institution and its curators and other 
officers—not a few of them have held office in the Society and its Sections— 
have been leaders in scientific studies in Leicester. Till late in the 
nineteenth century this could be said of no other institution. In modern 
days the growth and development of the University College, of the 
Colleges of Art and Technology, and of the Scientific Departments of 
Secondary Schools, have made a great change. There are in Leicester 
a number of men and women who are in virtue of their profession students 
and teachers of science. There has also been an increase of the number 
of experts in applied science who are employed in the service of the city, 
or are engaged in industry. The conditions of local scientific study have 
changed, and its possibilities are greater than ever. It may reasonably 
be hoped that there will always be a number of people who, though not 
professionally engaged in science, will find in some of its provinces an 
attractive but serious parergon for their leisure time, and that those who 
are professionally learned in one province may be amateurs in others. 
So it is reasonable to hope that such little societies as the Sections of the 
‘ Lit. and Phil.’ may in the future surpass the good work of their bygone 
years. 
Such a hope was expressed long ago in the Report of the Council to 
the Annual Meeting in June 1877: ‘ There is no reason why the Sections 
should not become small Societies in themselves, of recognised position, 
29 Three out of four first-year medical students who were attending these classes 
were killed in the war. , 
30 The Section for Chemistry began work in 1924-25, that for Physics in 1925— 
1926. 
