994 Western Society of Naturalists. 
to see a committee or committees raised which should report to us 
at our next meeting a well-digested exhibit of these matters. 
Nothing could be more useful to us, and nothing, I think, would 
bring our work more directly and favorably to the notice of our 
immediate public. And then, in the papers and discussions of our 
school and college associations, in our State and more local scientific 
societies and academies, we should bring to bear the ideas and 
principles established by discussion here, and so carry the work 
outward by concerted action, as by a movement in line. 
To our semi-scientific and scientific associates outside this body, 
we should, of course, carry whatever new thing of applicable value 
our meetings give us possession of, and thus enlarge the circle of 
the Society’s influence. In these and other ways I hope that we 
might do much to increase the number of intelligent local observers 
and earnest independent students—now far too few in this region— 
and thus help to create and sustain a scientific sentiment, in which 
the present and approaching generation certainly fall far short of 
that now going out of action. It is a suicidal blunder to dis- 
` courage the amateur, to undervalue the mere collector of speci- 
mens and reporter of facts, to create the impression, either wilfully 
or unwittingly, that none but the very learned have anything to do 
with the promotion of science. We cannot hang the truncated 
apex of our pyramid to the stars, not even to those of the German 
heaven—and if we could, we should not, for, after all, science 1s 
for man, and not man for science. The general public, it might 
seem, can scarcely be interested—even the more intelligent part of 
it—in a conference of specialists respecting their methods of tech- 
nical work, and yet I think that this view is not altogether correct. 
Whoever cares for the results of scientific inquiry must usually be 
curious, at least, concerning the methods by which those often sur- 
prising results are reached—and frequently the method is by far 
the more interesting and the more easily understood. While 
much of our discussion of details would be tedious, and many 
fragmentary contributions incomprehensible, we might, I think, 
at least prepare at each meeting one or more evening programmes 
for the general public, setting forth fully and systematically several 
of the more remarkable and interesting processes of the biological 
laboratory and the geological office; the pure culture of bacteria, 
