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LOCAL SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES.
Please understand that I am not protesting against scientific
terminology in itself, or in its right place ; but I do feel that it is
discouraging to the earnest inquirer after knowledge to find
himself confronted by books which he cannot understand, or
condemned to attend meetings where the language spoken is a
strange and uncouth tongue which he has no time to acquire.
The result is that our intelligent amateur, whether he be a
scientific man or no, is placed very much in the position where
he was sixty years ago ; and I believe that now, as then, he may
find salvation in the local scientific society, if it really attempts
to meet his wants.
Cannot the Local Societies, in addition to their ordinary
work, make a special effort to satisfy the educational needs of
the great many intelligent people who have not been trained in,
or have not had access to, laboratories, museums, and scientific
libraries, or whose opportunities have not brought them into
contact with field-work and the interests and occupations of
naturalists, and who desire to know more of science, and perhaps
to become themselves workers ?
It is true that for their working-purposes, especially if they
are naturalist or field clubs, it is advisable for them to break up
into sections, one perhaps occupied with the local fauna, another
with the local flora, and so on ; but if only they could succeed in
keeping their members together upon some common ground in
which they are united by a general interest in science, and
could offer some educational help to members to whom science
is chiefly a hobby and a relaxation, they would be doing work
which cannot be performed by any other sort of society or by
the publication of any ordinary text-book or treatise. In the
present state of scientific knowledge and specialisation nothing
can be more useful than to bring together persons interested in
different subjects and to enable them to understand one another.
Very much of the estrangement which now exists between
different sciences, or even between the different branches of the
same science, is due to the exaggerated use of technical language
where it is not necessary, so that a great deal of scientific work
is almost entirely unintelligible to the workers in other subjects.
The most useful function, in my opinion, that can be performed
by the Local Societies, in addition to that of kindling an interest
in local problems and in the methods by which they are to be
studied, is to encourage a habit of expressing scientific results
in simple and intelligible language that will appeal to the whole
society. There are very few scientific ideas or facts which,
cannot be expressed in homely language freed from technical
nomenclature, and though it is necessary for purposes of brevity
and precision to make use of this nomenclature in the journals
and at the meetings of the more specialised societies, it ought
to be wholly unnecessary to do so in societies which embrace a