222 THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS DELIVERED
seemed to me, in taking office, that it was in the interest of the
future of the Club, and indeed its duty, to do what was possible
to foster this Nature-study in schools, and the Council supported
my view.
The ball was set rolling by a Conference on the promotion
of Nature-study and the services that may be rendered by
local museums, at the Franco-British Exhibition in the Autumn
of 1908, when Mr. Wilfred Mark Webb opened a notable dis-
cussion. This was followed up by a meeting of the Club with
the West Ham and District Education Conference, held in this
room early in 1909, at which it was suggested that classes in
Natural History should be held for teachers at the Museum,
that field meetings for teachers should be arranged during the
summer months, and that the Museum should be utilized for
School Nature-study.
You are all aware of the large extent to which the last sugges-
tion has been earned out. One rarely passes through the
Museum without seeing groups of little people in the quest of
particular objects of study, and I am told that teachers bring
their classes to the Museum for lessons. Moreover, series of
field meetings for the teachers were arranged during the summer
of 1909 and again in 1910, and in the former year these were
followed by meetings at the Institute for identifying specimens
and discussing the results. One of these field meetings took
place in Hainhault Forest and was conducted by Mr. Cole
and myself. Nearly a hundred teachers attended, and proved
to be keen and intelligent students, anxious to learn all they
could from their conductors, though little versed in the pursuit
of Nature-knowledge on their own account, and the subsequent
meeting at the Institute was also marked by genuine interest.
But systematic classes for study we unfortunately failed
to establish, although I attended and spoke at the Annual
Meeting of the Conference, and Mr. Cole offered his services.
Mr. Paulson kindly interested himself in a scheme for a survey
of the flora of the waste places of West Ham, under which each
teacher and his class was given a collecting area, believing that
this might lead to systematic work. That again was fruitless.
Nevertheless the seed has been sown.
Meanwhile much has been done to complete the educational
side of the Museum, and to many, as to myself, it must now