174
LOCAL SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES.
carrying it on, is far more interesting and stimulating than any
secondhand account in text books and treatises of the work that
has been done at some previous time by others, and should not
require any additional embroidery to make it attractive. Anyone
who hears a keen naturalist describe the excitement with which
he has watched something new in the habits of animal or plant
must catch the spirit of enthusiasm, and feel the stir of interest
that is the inspiration of all successful teaching and learning.
Perhaps this sort of living interest has been too exclusively
confined to natural history communications in some of the Local
Societies. In reality the same excitement and the same interest
belong to new observations in any and every branch of science.
In fact, I often feel that the sort of book which is really
wanted at the present day is a simple untechnical account of the
living work by the worker himself. No matter how abstruse or
advanced a research may be, there is always something in it
which is of surpassing interest if understood, and this can surely
be expressed simply and made intelligible without any detailed
knowledge of the science in all its bearings. After all the
methods and results of science can just as well be taught by
examples drawn from the new work which marks the advancing
wave of progress as by what has gone before ; and the new thing
is always the most interesting.
I am aware that to many it will seem that popularisation of
the newest thing in science is being overdone at the present
time, and that we hear too much of radio-activity, wireless
telegraphy, and the rest. I am suggesting, however, that not
only the brilliant discoveries, which most easily attract the
public through the Press and fire the popular imagination,
should be taken up by the Local Societies, but that the more
ordinary work of everyday science, equally necessary and
perhaps equally momentous in its consequences, which is at
present buried in the proceedings of one sort of society, should
be made a real and living thing by the humbler societies of
another sort.
I am aware, too, that for educational purposes it is not
prudent to introduce children to the newest and imperfectly under-
stood results of modern science until the soil has been prepared by
the study of the more mature and better considered work which
has gone before ; but for the moment I am pleading the cause
not of school children, but of intelligent amateurs, many of
them persons of exceptional intelligence, some of them persons
of considerable scientific attainments and knowledge ; before
whom both the present achievements of scientific discoverers
and the humbler work that is being done by scientific students,
whether professional or amateur, may well be laid without all
the preliminary training that affords educational exercises to the
child at school.