450 the president's address. 



in our days he would have found a third source of wonder in 

 the contemplation of the simplest living things as revealed by 

 the microscope, in the combination they present of apparent 

 simplicity with infinite complexity, and of extreme minuteness- 

 with the most extraordinary powers. To me the observation of 

 a minute organism, such as an amoeba, under the microscope, is 

 in its way as marvellous as the sight of the starry firmament. 

 I see a minute, formless creature, without definite parts or 

 organs, which nevertheless exercises all the functions of life and 

 exhibits the germ of every faculty we possess, and thereby proves- 

 that its apparent simplicity and formlessness cloak a complexity 

 of organisation far transcending our powers of observation and 

 eluding our means of detection. What again can be more 

 wonderful to contemplate than the fact that peculiarities in 

 the complex mental endowment and physical structure of a 

 human being can be transmitted from one generation to the 

 next through the medium of a spermatozoon, the tiniest cell of 

 the human body, in which the microscope reveals only a structure 

 of the simplest kind ? These things must rank with the most 

 wonderful and inexplicable of the phenomena that nature presents 

 to us, and we are as yet only on the threshold of investigation. 

 The stellar universe has been observed, its laws and motions- 

 studied, for many thousands of years, but our acquaintance with 

 the beginnings of life and its properties as exhibited by the 

 simplest living things is but an affair of yesterday, as it were, and 

 the scientific study of life is as yet in its infancy. 



In these da} T s of vast and rapid increase of knowledge in such 

 matters there is danger that we may lose the true perspective^ 

 and that our perception of the whole may be blunted and obscured 

 by the immense mass of detail which forces us to attend only to 

 a small part of our science. It is the special function of a club 

 such as ours to keep fresh our enthusiasm and to enlarge our 

 outlook by contact and intercourse with those working in other 

 fields, to spread the infection, if I may use the term, of intelligent 

 curiosity in the minutest natural objects, and thereby to attract 

 and enlist new workers in a field in which the harvest is plentiful 

 but the labourers are few. 



Jcu /'. Quekett Microscopical Club, Scr. 2. Vol. X., JS'o. Gj, November 1909. 



