16 SPRING MEETING. 



education was to obliterate individualism, and as years passed by 

 that earlier generation of Cornislimen, who had the gift of 

 interpreting the records that remained, would be taken from 

 them, and perhaps the new generation would have lost some of 

 that special power of interpretation, and the county would have 

 lost a vast amount of knowledge worthy of being retained. 

 Mr. Howard Fox seconded the motion, which was unanimously 

 carried. A vote of thanks was accorded the president, on the 

 proposition of Messrs. J. C. Daubuz and Henderson. 



Mr. Williams, in response, said one thing struck him in 

 sitting there, and that was the difficulty of conducting and 

 keeping the interest of al] connected with the Institution focussed 

 on any paper or any subject. One tendency of knowledge, or 

 the increase of knowledge in these modern days, was to encourage 

 the specialist and destroy the interest in a subject of those who 

 were only smatterers in anything. As knowledge increased in all 

 the innumerable branches, so developed the specialist, who was 

 the only man who knew anything on any one subject, and he 

 talked a jargon which no one else could understand. His 

 impression was that in an Institution of that sort they would 

 have to fall back more and more uxDon the good old-fashioned 

 smatterers, who knew a little of everything and not much of 

 anything. 



