literature of science. Professor Flinders Petrie lately used a memorable expression, that this age is drunk with writing. Anyone who has tried to light a fire will know that when too much paper is used in the kindling, the flame is extinguished by its own smoke. From these metaphors you may understand the risk to which scientific truth is exposed of being disabled and smothered by the multitude of its exponents. Observations must be recorded. Writers can only attain efficiency by reiterated efforts. But it is not necessary that every beginner's essays, every crude attempt at research, every uncompleted investigation, every reproduction of the obvious and the commonplace, should be printed and published. Those who are engaged in bibliography, classification, and monographic work of every kind, however free they may be from critical cynicism, cannot close their eyes to the difference of merit in the writers whose works they are obliged to examine. The difference often ranges from supreme excellence to detestable badness. By publishing what is old as though it were new; by incomplete, inaccurate, confused and misleading descriptions of what is really new; by hypotheses based on easily avoidable ignorance, authors win themselves no honour, and they grievously trouble science. Those, too, do an injury to themselves and their neighbours who, out of carelessness, or out of self-will, or out of superfluous modesty, use irregular, unrecognised, and obscure means of publication for discoveries that are valuable and good.
Our Union will have justified its existence if it can persuade its members and all who come within the sphere of its influence to put mischief and destructiveness out of countenance, to discourage the diffusion of useless knowledge, to bring loyal effort and arduous exertion in the service of truth into prominence and the full light of day.
More I shall forbear to tell you anent the wisdom and the profit of all that we wish to do and to do not; remembering how even the eager and enquiring Queen of Sheba, on her visit to the Hebrew Linnæus, was so tired out with all that she heard and saw that there was no more spirit in her. Only to timid and hesitating beginners I may venture to say one concluding word. Believe me, that ever as you pursue your path through the fairyland of science, and become more and more acquainted with the
