Darwin-Wallace Celebration. 27 



predilections lead me to refer especially to your charming- 

 book on Extinct Animals, which brings home to every 

 intelligent mind, as no other book does, the historic evidence 

 of Evolution. 



You have ever shown yourself a true Biologist, whose 

 interests have always extended to plants as well as to animals, 

 and whom on many occasions botanists have welcomed as 

 a helpful friend and ally. 



In the controversies inseparable from the advancement 

 of a great principle, you have always been the vigorous and 

 consistent advocate of Darwinism in the strict sense, and 

 like Weismann in Germany, you, in England, have striven to 

 uphold and to develope, on the lines of Darwin and Wallace, 

 the doctrine of the Origin of Species by means of Variation 

 and Natural Selection. 



On all these grounds, and on many others, did time allow 

 me to state them, I have great pleasure in handing you the 

 Darwin- Wallace Medal. 



Sir RAY LANKESTER, K.C.B., F.R.S., F.L.S., replied : 

 Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen, 



It is a great and stirring occasion on which we are here 

 assembled to-day. There are those among us who remember 

 well the first of July fifty years ago, when Sir Charles Lyell 

 and Dr. Joseph Hooker communicated to a meeting of the 

 Linnean Society the independently thought out views of 

 Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace as to the origin 

 of species. Never was there a more beautiful example of 

 modesty, of unselfish admiration for another's work, of loyal 

 determination that the other should receive the full merit of 

 his independent labours and thought, than was shown by 

 Charles Darwin on that occasion. 



Subsequently, throughout all their arduous work and 

 varied publications upon the great doctrine which they on 

 that day unfolded to humanity as an absolutely new and 

 untried engine of thought the same complete absence of 

 rivalry characterised these high-minded Englishmen, even 



