lUfNEAN SOCIETY OF LONDON. 11 



to the few mentioned in my last year's address. Physiological and 

 anatomical botany are, on the other hand, much more steadily 

 worked out in Germany and in France than with us. Several im- 

 portant papers have already, since the restoration of 2)eace, been pub- 

 lished in Pringsheim's ' Jahrbiicher ' and in Hanstein's 'Botanische 

 Abhandlungen,' both of them specially devoted to this branch of the 

 science; and in France the recent numbers of the 'Annales des 

 Sciences Naturelles ' are chiefly taken up with papers by Van 

 Tieghem, De Gris, Trecul, and others, a more detailed notice of 

 which would lead me too far for the present occasion. 



There are two general subjects upon which the bulky mass of 

 literature continues, to receive considerable accessions both in this 

 country and on the continent, without perhaps adding much to oux 

 stock of information, and which would at any rate require long and 

 patient study to extract what may be really of value ; these are 

 Darwinism and so-called Spontaneous Generation. Dar'wdnism in 

 some shape or other, or something under that name, enters more or 

 less into almost all general discussions on points of natural history, 

 especially on the Continent ; and so far as it is applicable to what 

 the Germans call the "Descendenztheorie," it is being more or less 

 tacitly adopted by the great majority of naturalists ; but in a general 

 way, the comj)rehensive hypotheses propounded by Darwin in his 

 various works are still the subject of much polemical discussion. 

 Seidlitz, in his work entitled ' Die Darwin'sche Theorie,' fills thirty 

 pages with the mere titles of the works, memoii's, or papers pub- 

 lished on the subject since 1859 ; and to this enumeration many 

 additions might be made. Amidst this great mass it might have 

 been expected that I should select some to bring specially under 

 your notice — that I should follow up the observations I made on 

 the ' Origin of Species ' in my Address of 1863, and on the ' Va- 

 riation of Animals and Plants under Domesticity ' in that of 1868, 

 by some notice of the ' Descent of Man,' as well as of some recent 

 works of other writers, such as Mivart's 'Genesis of Species;' but 

 these have been already fully discussed by naturalists much more 

 competent than a purely systematic botanist to deal with the ques- 

 tion in the phase which it has now reached, and I have not met 

 with any other work in which any connected series of observations 

 have been methodized and brought to bear more directlj' on the 

 general life-history of animals and plants. The detached observa- 

 tions upon several points connected with Darwin's general theories, 

 especially those relating to dichogamy and cross-fertUization in 

 plants, continue to be very numerous, as well as the endeavours to 



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