guest of Professor Alfred Newton, where I also found Sir Archibald 

 Geikie as a member of the party. Mr. Balfour, as he was then and for 

 long afterward, was not only the Prime Minister of England but also 

 the President of the British Association for the year. The presidential 

 address is always an affair of ceremony and is delivered publicly in the 

 evening and in some large hall. An extensive platform is erected for the 

 speaker and on this are rows of seats for foreign and distinguished guests. 

 I was in the second row of seats on the platform and in the middle 

 line, just behind Professor George Darwin. Mr. Balfour came in quietly, 

 with no decorations and in ordinary evening dress, like any private 

 gentleman in appearance. He came up on the platform and sat down 

 and then, turning around, put his hand on Darwin's knee and said: 

 "Hello, George! how are you?" The German guests, of whom a con- 

 siderable number were present, were scandalised by such undignified 

 ways and gave free vent to their lacerated feelings. 



While in Cambridge, I attended the meetings of the Zoological Section 

 almost entirely, as the papers and discussions in that section were much 

 the liveliest and most interesting. Mendel's results, forgotten since 1866, 

 had been rediscovered by de Vries and other botanists in 1900. This 

 rediscovery aroused the most intense activity among zoologists and 

 botanists alike and led to the development of the new science of genetics. 

 In England, the most prominent leader in the new movement was 

 William Bateson, who kept the zoological section well stirred up, for, 

 like many other biologists, he believed that the key to the mystery of 

 evolution was to be found in the study of Mendelian inheritance. So 

 bitter did some of the discussions become that old friendships were 

 irretrievably broken. As for myself, I had witnessed the rise, culmination 

 and decline of so many promising theories that my attitude was 

 sceptical. Uncle Jack Robinson's formula, "Mebbe it is, but I don't 

 believe it," is often very applicable. 



Ten years later, Bateson was president of the Association for the 

 Australian meeting of 1914, and his address on that occasion was a cry 

 of despair, as to ever finding the solution of the evolutionary mystery. 

 This address and, still more, the lecture which he delivered in Toronto 

 in 1923, was really the occasion of the obscurantist, reactionary move- 

 ment against the theory of Evolution, which was so vehemently cham- 

 pioned by Mr. Bryan and culminated in the Scopes trial at Dayton, 

 Tenn. Bateson afterwards cried "peccavi" and admitted that his 

 unguarded statements had been completely misunderstood as abandon- 

 ing the doctrine of Evolution, which he did not do at all. Though 



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