THE president's ADDRESS. 167 



-and are undergoing daily further modifications in the incessant 

 striving towards the goal of unattainable perfection. The first 

 scientific zoologists used classifications scarcely more elaborate 

 than those in popular use. Each worker climbs by the help of 

 those who have gone before, and adds laboriously his pebble to 

 the pile they have raised. 



The invisible or microscopic world stands on a very different 

 footing in relation to human knowledge. Its cognisance does 

 not come within the scope of the unassisted human senses, con- 

 -sequently the vast majority of mankind pass through life without 

 the reality of this world of minute creatures ever being brought 

 home to them, at least as an actual and concrete fact. They 

 ^anay read or hear of the existence of living beings which are 

 vaguely referred to as ' microbes," or by the misapplied word 

 *' germs," but these mystic creatures remain words, mere words, 

 .as unreal 



As the gay motes that people the sunbeams, 

 Or likest hovering dreams 



The fickle pensioners of Morpheus' train. 



IS^o detailed descriptions or figures can possibly convey by them- 

 selv^es any tangible idea of microscopic objects. The microscopist's 

 unit of measurement, a micron, impresses the mind with no more 

 sense of actuality than the astronomer's unit of a million miles. 



It is the microscope, the instrument for the cultivation and 

 application of which this Club exists, that has brought this 

 vast medley of living things within the range of human per- 

 ceptions. The microscope has discov^ered a new world for us, and 

 its help is indispensable in exploring and administering the 

 newly acquired territory. But the microscope, as compared with 

 the human race, even as compared with civilised man, is relatively 

 a thing of yesterday. Great minds have lived and died, vast 

 systems of philosophy have been founded, before anything that 

 we should call a microscope came into existence, before anything 

 was known of the great invisible world of lower organisms, for 

 which I shall use Haeckel's convenient term the Protista.* And 

 the microscope is itself an instrument which is growing, evolving, 

 daily becoming more efficient. It is not yet adequate for our 

 needs, for we know on the surest evidence that there are living 



* For the purposes of this address, I leave out of consideration those 

 aaicroscopic organisms, such as Rotifers, which belong to a higher rank. 



