CORRESPONDING SOCIETIES 447 



was reflected in their product, and the chief products of a University are the 

 men and women who leave its walls. 



To take but one line of investigation : think of that great band of 

 naturalist travellers and adventurers who left the University of Edinburgh 

 to gather knowledge in the ends of the earth. We cannot doubt that some- 

 thing of the spirit which animated them was born in these class-rooms 

 where knowledge of the plant and animal worlds was laid open to them. 

 In the Dark Continent of Africa there was James Bruce who discovered the 

 sources of the White Nile, Mungo Park and Balfour Baikie who explored the 

 Niger, Sir Andrew Smith who brought back the first sure knowledge of the 

 Limpopo. To the wastes of the Arctic Ocean went William Scoresby, and, 

 after his time, the Franklin expeditions were staffed by Edinburgh natura- 

 lists — Sir John Richardson, who finally led the Franklin search expedition 

 of 1847-49, H. D. S. Goodsir who lost his life with Franklin on the expedi- 

 tion of 1845. The most far-seeing naturalist traveller of them all, Charles 

 Darwin, had his baptism of academic natural history from that same Chair, 

 as his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, a great man also, had before him. 

 And who can tell how much the scientific exploration of the seas owes to 

 Edinburgh students of the old school, Edward Forbes who founded the 

 science of Oceanography, Sir Wyville Thomson who, as organiser and leader 

 of the Challenger Expedition, conducted the greatest scientific voyage ever 

 planned, and contributed more than any single man to our knowledge of the 

 oceans and their inhabitants ; Sir John Murray whom I knew in his later 

 years, who carried on the work of the Challenger after Wyville Thomson's 

 death, and my old friend Dr. W. S. Bruce who organised and led one of the 

 most successful of those Antarctic Expeditions which marked the opening 

 of the present century. These were great men, men of broad outlook and 

 wide sympathies ; practically all of them were students of medicine, for 

 that was then the only gate to the biological courses ; many of them never 

 reached the stage of gaining a University degree, but all passed through the 

 discipline of the old-fashioned natural history. 



And now the tree of the knowledge of natural history has so flourished 

 that many of its great branches, like an Indian banyan tree, have lowered 

 their own supports into the soil, and have become all but independent 

 oflFshoots. That is as it should be, for progressive evolution is bound up 

 with increase in specialisation ; but specialisation of itself is not enough, 

 evolution also implies more perfect unity and co-ordination with each step 

 in specialisation. Division of labour is useless without co-operation. That, 

 the co-ordination of the developing and diverging branches of knowledge, 

 is the problem of the moment. How that aflfects the Universities I do not 

 mean to discuss here, but I should like to glance at the changes which 

 specialisation has brought about in the outlook of the local natural history 

 societies. 



On reading the addresses of past Presidents of this Conference, I notice 

 that grave differences of opinion have been expressed as to the purposes 

 for which your societies were formed. One view (expressed by Mr. John 

 Hopkinson at the Havre meeting in 19 14) is that the purpose of local 

 natural history societies is to investigate the Natural History of their 

 locality, and that no other purpose can justify the existence of sucn a 

 society. If that definition were accepted, how many of the societies 

 scattered throughout the length and breadth of the land would survive the 

 test ? Comparatively few ; yet the remaining societies fill a useful place in 

 the development of nature knowledge. I lean to a much wider conception 

 of the function of a Natural History Society (such as that propounded by 

 Prof. G. A. Lebour at the Newcastle meeting of 1916). 



