LIXKEAN SOCIETY OF LONDON. 27 



PilESIDEiVTIAL ADDRESS, l!J23. 



A HUNDRED years ago yesterday a i'ew Fellows oE the Liuneau 

 Society met to tliscuss and adopt a series of rules for a Zoological 

 Club which it had been decided to t'orin within the Society. It 

 was apparently thought that some ot" the more technical com- 

 municatious on comparative anatomy and on British zoology 

 could be received and discussed more satisfactorily by a small 

 body of specialists than by a general meeting of the Society. 

 The question of zoological nomenclature even then was also 

 agitating tlie Fellows, and this subject was relegated to the select 

 small circle so early as 1825. The Club, however, with its 

 separate meetings, never received much support. The minute 

 book records that on several occasions there was no quorum to 

 form a meeting; and in 1827 when the Honorary Secretary, 

 Mr. N. A. Vigors, left to become Secretary of the newly formed 

 " Zoological Institution" (as it was then termed), the Club gradu- 

 ally declined until in November 1829 it came suddenly to an end 

 without any formal closing. From that time onwards those who 

 wished to pursue zoology separately and intently joined the 

 " Scientific Committee'* of the then chartered Zoological Society, 

 and the Linnean was left to pursue its old course. During the 

 past century our Society has been actively engaged in biology in 

 its widest sense ; and while publishing purely technical papers on 

 both botany and zoology, it has always fostered discussions in 

 which the devotees of both these branches of biological science 

 could effectively take part. With a larger Fellowship than at any 

 ])revious time, and with more numerously attended meetings, the 

 Society still takes the broad view which it inherits from the 

 illustrious Linnanis, and the modern problems of heredity and 

 mendelism — indeed all the factors and phenomena of organic 

 evolution — can best be treated here. During the past session, to 

 name only two examples, we have published Prof. Garstang's 

 examination of tlie theory of recapitulation (or Haeckel's bio- 

 generic law ), and we have received and discussed Dr. Kammerer's 

 nnisterly account of his experiments which he considers to prove 

 the inheritance of acquired characters. 



These comprehensive discussions particularly interest a palaion- 

 tologist because he tries to recover the actual documentary 

 evidence of the history of the world of life and is thus concerned 

 in tracing lineages, lie still adopts the Linnean plan of nomen- 

 clature as a matter of convenience. His use of specific, generic, 

 and family names approximates indeed more closely to the broad 

 conception of Liniueus than to the narrower sense in which they 

 are now usually applied to the classiticalion of existing plants and 

 animals. Sometimes, however, he feels that this nomenclature 

 scarcely expresses his meaning. Many of his so-called genera 

 include species derived from more than one lineage ; many of his 



