CONFERENCE OF DELEGATES OF 
CORRESPONDING SOCIETIES 
THE Conference was held in the Stuart Hall and the Girls’ Old High 
School, Norwich, on September 6 and 11 respectively, under the 
Presidency of Prof. P. G. H. Boswell, F.R.S., 47 delegates attending, 
representing 52 societies, in addition to a large audience. 
Friday, September 6. 
ADDRESS ON 
THE PRESERVATION OF SITES OF SCIENTIFIC 
INTEREST IN TOWN AND COUNTRY PLANNING 
By Pror. P. G. H. Boswett, F.R.S., 
President of the Conference. 
IT is now twenty-eight years since Sir Halford Mackinder, in his Presidential 
Address to this Annual Conference of Delegates, directed attention to a 
new and broad conception in geography—the regional aspect. The new 
point of view, as a friend of mine remarked at the time, invited us to replace 
the old line-and-dot geography of our childhood by consideration of vast 
spaces. But, while a close attention to lines and dots (and for that matter, 
lines and beacons) is still a necessity of modern life—indeed has been revived 
by the rapid development of the internal combustion engine—we cannot 
but rejoice at the impetus given since 1907 to regional studies. I may be 
forgiven for exhibiting a particular and personal interest in these historical 
reflections, for the British Association Meeting at Leicester in 1907 was 
the first that I attended ; moreover, I listened to Sir Halford Mackinder as 
a delegate from an East Anglian corresponding society. 
The regional aspects of geography are intimately connected with the 
subject of this address, which is the consideration of the part the Association 
can play in the safeguarding of sites and objects of scientific interest which 
may be threatened in the course of town and country planning, for without 
the systematic recording of areas and objects of scientific interest, the active 
prosecution of which Sir Halford Mackinder urged to the Conference of 
Delegates in 1907, it will not be possible to take advantage of the oppor- 
tunities now afforded for their appropriate preservation. 
Another predecessor of mine in this Chair devoted his address to the 
same general question. In 1924 Prof. J. L. Myres discussed in his usual 
scholarly fashion the problem of ‘ The Conservation of Sites of Scientific 
Interest.’ He then indicated four categories of objects which were worthy 
of preservation : ancient buildings and other monuments raised by the hand 
of man ; sites of historic interest on account of some human achievement ; 
districts of natural beauty, preserved for public enjoyment ; and places of 
scientific interest, necessarily also often picturesque, such as haunts of wild 
