Possibilities of Societies. 43 



work in the future. The Society has a wide and a promising 

 field for cuhivation before it. There is, I think, a growing 

 need of such centres and sources of illumination in a com- 

 munity like Dumfries. The spread of education in modern 

 times has resulted in an enormous extension of public interest 

 in historical and in scientific questions. The daily papers 

 teem with articles on the higher criticism of ancient 

 chronicles, on birds, beasts, and fishes, on radium, Marconi- 

 grams and synthetic rubber. Any schoolboy could now 

 refute those vulgar errors to the exposure of which the great 

 Sir Thomas Browne devoted a learned and weighty volume, 

 which will live as literature although its expository utility is 

 no more. And this vivid public interest in historical and 

 scientific inquiries concentrates itself in many places in 

 associations and institutions and Societies having for their 

 object the prosecution of research and the advancement of 

 natural knowledge. 



Of course in these days of high specialisation and of 

 co-operative investigation, it is to our Universities, Colleges, 

 our Guilds, and Technical Schools that have sprung up so 

 copiously of recent years, with their staffs of experts, 

 libraries, museums, and laboratories, and to our great 

 National and Metropolitan Antiquarian and Scientific 

 Associations, with the stimulus and the co-ordination of 

 scattered observations they are able to supply — it is to these 

 that we must look mainly for further enlightenment and 

 discovery ; but outside the sphere of all these there is, it seems 

 to me, ample room for a local Society like this to contribute 

 to the general body of the most advanced antiquarian and 

 biological knowledge of the day. 



If this Society did no more than draw its members 

 together in pleasant and democratic social intercourse, 

 quicken in them their interest in the relics and in the flora 

 and fauna of the country round them, while keeping them 

 abreast of what is going on, in the departments within its 

 scope, in the great world beyond, and affording them whole- 

 some recreation, its existence would be amply justified. 

 Participation in a common pursuit promotes friendly, 

 neighbourly feeling, and agreeable social intercourse breaks 

 down artificial conventional barriers. Everyone ought to 



