24
ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE 21st ANNUAL
MEETING OF THE ESSEX FIELD CLUB,
MARCH 30th, 1901.
By DAVID HOWARD, J.P., F.C.S., President.
In completing my term of office as President I must yet
again congratulate the Club on the achievement of the long
delayed purpose of establishing a Museum, alike to render
permanent, and to spread more widely, the work of the Society.
I need not go again over the history of that arduous, "and at
times seemingly hopeless, task, but would venture to remind our
members that the real work is but begun; in museums, as in
everything else, growth is the text of life, and without living
progress, a Museum sinks into the fossil stage of existence
and is best buried out of sight along with other fossils. Unfortu-
nately we already find that we need more money to develop the
work, and any who are willing to assist, may rest well assured
that their money will be fruitfully expended under the care of
our indefatigable Curator. We are already beginning to feel
that space, and not the wherewithal to fill it, will be our difficulty,
and that even the noble generosity of Mr. Passmore Edwards so
freely supplemented by that of the Technical Education Com-
mittee of the Borough of West Ham. has given us none too much
room for our museum work. Perhaps some will say, "there is
no satisfying such people." It is quite true, and it is better so;
in scientific as in some more important matters, the sense of ful-
filment and satisfaction is a very dangerous one. I do not know
that there is great need that I should impress this on most of
those here; for which of us, even in those matters in which we
have done most, and learned most, is under any delusion that he
has exhausted the possibilities. But I would urge all to keep
this truth in mind, and not to fail to impress it on those especially
who having made less progress are less conscious how little
progress they have made. And there is special danger in a too
keen satisfaction in the work of greater minds who have pre-
ceeded us. A great teacher may even dwarf the minds of his
pupils, by giving them an unconscious despair of progress, by the
admiration they rightly feel for his work. It was not the pro-
foundly scientific, if imperfect, teaching of Aristotle, but the fatal
"ipse magister dixit" of the schoolmen, that dwarfed scientific