CORRESPONDING SOCIETIES 449 



enthusiasm of the local naturalist has of recent years become chocked, 

 blocked by time and progress. The very thoroughness of the listing, 

 carried on through many years, has made more and more remote the pos- 

 sibility of discovering some new thing, and since it is discovery which gives 

 the urge and flavour to all scientific investigation, the salt of local-list making 

 has lost much of its savour. Moreover the fact that new species have now 

 become rare discoveries in the faunas of civilised lands has driven the pro- 

 fessional systematist to seek his discoveries in finer and more subtle discrim- 

 ination between related forms, so that where specific identification was once 

 regarded as all-sufficing, now the determination of sub-species and varieties, 

 geographical races and sub-races, is deemed necessary ; where Linnaeus, 

 and naturalists for more than a century after him, were satisfied with 

 binomial labels for plants and animals, the modern specialist demands 

 trinomials. It no longer satisfies this demand for minute accuracy to dis- 

 tinguish a Goldcrest from a Firecrest ; one must be able to say whether the 

 Goldcrest, this smallest of our birds, is Regulus regulus regiilus, a visitor to 

 Britain from the mainland of Europe, or Regulus regulus anglorum, a British- 

 born subject ; or whether the crossbill of the winter months is the alien 

 Loxia curvirostra curvirostra or the native Loxia curvirostra scotica. 



This growing subtlety of identification, exemplified in another group by 

 the use of the comparative anatomy of the genetalia of insects, has played 

 into the hands of the specialist ; it requires time, thorough knowledge, a 

 mass of specialist literature often difficult to obtain ; in fact, more than any 

 other development, it has frozen out the amateur of the natural history 

 societies from a province that for ages was particularly his own. 



It would be a grievous blow to the usefulness of the societies and to their 

 self-esteem as a corporate part of the organisation of science in this country 

 were it to be felt that their day of co-operation in scientific progress had come 

 to an end. It has not come to an end, of that I am sure, but I think that the 

 direction of effort must be changed to meet the new conditions, and therefore 

 I propose to suggest some lines of natural history investigation along which 

 the societies may readily contribute their quota to the advancement of 

 knowledge. 



The Future Outlook of the Natural History Societies. 



In the development of scientific work during the present century two 

 notable changes have been taking place. In the first place there is a marked 

 tendency, due to the growing complexity of scientific problems, to forsake 

 the old individualistic form of research — the researcher ploughing his lonely 

 furrow — and to replace isolation by the collaboration of many workers, 

 organised as a team, whose joint labours, carefully planned, converge upon 

 some definite problem. That is the secret of most present-day attacks 

 upon problems of nutrition, of human diseases, of diseases of domestic 

 animals, of the economic exploitation of the fisheries ; it was just such 

 organised team work which enabled the Drosophila-zoology of Morgan to 

 create a flood which almost swept zoologists off their feet. 



This method of co-operation is no new thing to the members of this con- 

 ference. At the Newcastle meeting of 1916 Prof. G. A. Lebour laid before 

 you many excellent suggestions for joint work upon geological problems. 

 To-day I am concerned rather with natural history from the zoological 

 point of view. And the second notable change which has been taking place 

 in scientific development points the way along which the societies might 

 well move, with profit to themselves and to science. 



During the present century there has been an enormous change in the 



