1868.] DE SOLA — THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 445 



ambulacral centre, then my theory falls to the ground. But all 

 experience in Palaeontology has proved over and over again, that 

 although we can show that the extinct animals, whose remains we 

 find buried in the earlier formations, possessed organs identical in 

 their functions with those of the existing races, yet they were not 

 always combined together in the same manner. As an example 

 we have only to refer to the Crinoidea. In the few species known 

 to live in the seas of the present day, the mouth and the vent are 

 separate orifices ; but in the palaeozoic species they were combined 

 into one. Why, then, is it impossible that the mouth and radial 

 centre, which are now united, could not be separate in the earlier 

 ages ? This question, however, can be decided without argument. 

 I have specimens lying before me, in which we can see the mouth 

 and also the radial centre, and at the same time see that they are 

 not in the same place. A long train of reasoning is not necess- 

 ary, — only simple inspection. 



A FEW POINTS OF INTEREST IN THE STUDY OF 

 NATURAL HISTORY. 



THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS BY THE REV. A. DE SOLA, LL.D. 



Ladies and Gentlemen, — The study of Natural History, if 

 merely considered in its aspect of a branch of human knowledge, has 

 a claim on every one's attention. It is a knowledge which is not 

 merely power, but pleasure ; and has claims great and peculiar on 

 both the theoretical and practical man. The theoretical will find in 

 it almost boundless scope for absorbing and interesting cogitation in 

 such inquiries as the origin of species, spontaneous generation, the 

 animal or vegetable character of certain obscure forms of life, the 

 correlation of physical forces, mutual relations of the physical and 

 vital forces, and similar modern engagements of human thought. 

 The other great class, the practical, who have been taught by the 

 books of their earliest youth to appreciate the difference between 

 ' eyes and no eyes,' will also be prepared fully to admit with the 

 student of Natural History that, merely to see an object, or to 

 remember its name, is not to know it ; and that if thoroughness 

 of knowledge be essential or desirable in all the practical engage- 

 ments of life, it must be equally so in our study of the countless 

 objects of nature's universal domain — objects that are inseparably 



