990 Western Society of Naturalists. 
And third, the progress resulting from the substitution of a 
younger and more highly educated working generation for an older 
one largely without special training. 
From all this has come a recent change of status and surround- 
ings, a modification of standards, a shifting of purposes and 
responsibilities, an accession of ideas, and a multiplication of duties, 
such as to compel us to consider the situation anew, and to urgently 
require a reorganization, along new lines, of whatever strength we 
can muster. In brief, the old machinery of scientific organization 
and development here in the West is much of it obsolete and in- 
active, and, taken as a whole, it is insufficient for the present day. 
The field of operation proposed by our Society—that of the improve- 
ment of methods of work, study, and instruction, is newly opened 
up to us by the rapid multiplication and complication of our sub- 
jects. The work we shall do is largely a new work, laid upon us 
as a condition of further symmetrical growth ; and its performance 
is a duty which the promoters and curators of science and education 
in this region can avoid only at their own peril, and to the injury 
of the interests for which they have made themselves responsible. 
we look now to the benefits which we as individuals may hope 
to derive from our meetings, I count as most important some of 
those which are perhaps least obvious. 
We are distinguished especially as a Society by an attention to 
methods rather than to results. That each worker should be deeply 
interested in whatever improvements of method are brought to 
light in his own field goes without saying, for in scientific research 
the method is, next to the man, the most important thing; the 
quality of the result depends on the choice of it, and the quantity 
upon that ready familiarity with it which makes every stroke tell 
to the best advantage ; but if this were all, we should find ourselves 
splitting up into little sections of specialists, each indifferent to the 
other; or resolving ourselves, as an alternative, into a mut 
toleration society, each group bearing patiently with the discussions 
of the others, that it might have the floor itself in turn. In fact, 
however, the methods of the different sciences are much more closely 
related than their results, and I am much mistaken if I, as a zo0l0- 
gist, shall not learn at least as much from the contributions to 
scientific method made by the botanists and geologists as from those 
