Vm PEOCEEDINGS OF THE 



May 24th, 1873. 



Anniversary Meeting. 



George Bentham, Esq., President, in tlie Chair. 



This day, the Anniversary of the birth of Linnaeus, and the day 

 appointed by the Charter for the election of Council and Officers, 

 the President opened the business of the Meeting with the follow- 

 ing Address : — 



GENXLEMEIf, 



Whilst preparing a few notes on the recent progress of the study of 

 Vegetable Anatomy and Physiology, I have been struck with the 

 observation made by more than one critic in this country, and com- 

 mented upon in some foreign journals, that we in England are in 

 this respect some way behind our continental neighbours — that, for 

 instance, the most important investigations and consequent dis- 

 coveries relating to sexual propagation and the incipient history of 

 cryptogamic plants and microscopic animals have been made in 

 France and Germany — and that we are, in short, comparatively defi- 

 cient in what the Germans are pleased specially to distinguish by 

 the name of Scientific Botany and Zoology. Without admitting for 

 a moment that there is less of science in the study of the compara- 

 tive anatomy, the mutual relations and consequent natural arrange- 

 ment, and the geographical distribution of the higher animals and 

 plants than in that of microscopic structure, we may acknowledge 

 that there may be some truth in the remark that, with few excep- 

 tions, we have not excelled in that long, patient, and tedious devotion 

 to one subject of limited extent from which such discoveries have 

 usually resulted ; and the fact may be, in some measure, the result of 

 our social habits and ideas. Our early education, the whole ten- 

 dency of our lives, is generally dii^ected to the means of advancement 

 in the world, if not always to the increase of income, at any rate to 

 the raising of our social position in the eyes of those amongst whom 

 we Kve. If the enormous increase in our commercial and industrial 

 wealth be carefully investigated, it will be found to be in many 

 respects deeply indebted to the recent progress of pure natural 

 science ; and yet the necessar}'^ study of that pure science will neither 



