50 PRESIDEXTIA.L ADDRESS. 



account of the progress of microscopical science, and of the 

 recent improvements in lenses and other appliances, that it would 

 be a work of supererogation, if not of presumption, on my part, 

 to attempt to add anything to what has been so well said by a 

 predecessor in this office. In a Society like ours, which has 

 existed for some 30 years, and has been presided over by men of 

 great learning and ability, the task of preparing an address is not 

 a light one ; for the President-elect is pretty certain to find that 

 almost every subject of interest, upon which he feels he might 

 have something to say, has been exhaustively treated by a former 

 occupant of this chair. There is one subject which has not only 

 attracted, but I might almost say, has in many cases absorbed the 

 attention of naturalists during the last quarter of this century. I 

 refer to those great problems which are involved in the laws 

 which seem to regulate the development of organic beings. The 

 publication of that admirable work of the great naturalist, Charles 

 Darwin, " On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural 

 Selection," marked the advent of the theory of " evolution," as it 

 has been generally called, in this country. Few theories have 

 been more travestied or roughly handled. Such a description of 

 it as the following by a well-known poet is as good an example of 

 this as any that occurs to me : — 



" That mass man sprang from was a jelly lump, 



Once on a time ; he kept an after course 



Through fish and insect, reptile, bird, and beast, 



Till he attained to be an ape at last, 



Or last but one." 

 Professor Alleyne Nicholson, in his able work entitled " The 

 Ancient Life History of the Earth," observes, " Geology teaches 

 that the physical features which now distinguish the earth's 

 surface have been produced as the ultimate result of an almost 

 endless succession of precedent changes. Palaeontology teaches 

 us, though not yet in such assured accents, the same lesson. Our 

 present animals and plants have not been produced, in their 

 innumerable forms, each as we now know it, as the sudden, 

 collective, and simultaneous birth of a renovated world. On the 

 contrary, we have the clearest evidence that some of our existing 

 animals and plants made their appearance upon the earth at a 

 much earlier period than others. In the confederation of 



