UXNFAX SOCIETT OF LOXDOX. IX 



enrich the one who would devote himself to it, nor yet raise him in 

 the estimation of his neighbours and associates, whilst it may seri- 

 ously interfere with his means of bringing up his family, reduced 

 as they become by the rapid increase in the expense of living. 

 TN'^e have not in this country those numerous small professorships or 

 government or municipal places in provincial towns, which give to 

 a man of modest requirements sufficient leisure steadily to carry on 

 his researches year after year without interruption. Content with 

 what he has thus secured, many a continental naturalist looks for 

 no further advancement ; he requires no relaxation but perhaps a 

 few weeks in summer spent at a bathing-place ; he seeks his reward 

 in the pubHcation of the results of his labours in Transactions or 

 Journals, or a favourable report, without having to calciJate on 

 pecuniary results. If we had any such places in this country, few 

 Englishmen could be found to sit down in them to rest and be satis- 

 fied ; and it has required some moral courage in those of our young 

 men who, having enough to live upon, with a passion for science, 

 have for its sake renounced all attempts to climb round after round 

 on the social ladder. We have had, however, and still have such 

 men. With aU our social drawbacks we have contributed our fair 

 share to the progress of natural as well as of physical, mathematical, 

 and other sciences. We have had our Robert Brown, and long before 

 him oui' John Ray. Among our living zoologists and comparative 

 anatomists I could name those who yield nothing to any of their 

 continental rivals ; and above all we must remember that it is an 

 Englishman who has, in this nineteenth century, brought about as 

 great a revolution in the philosophic study of organic nature, as that 

 which was effected in the previous century by the immortal Swede. 

 With such names as Linnaeus and Darwin the northern nations can 

 well hold their own in the presence of any scientific celebrities of 

 Central Europe. 



One instance of the backwardness on our part, to which I have 

 alluded, is afforded in the investigation of the progress of growth, 

 and especially of the first formation and early development of the 

 organized individual, which, under the new lights thrown upon the 

 subject by the Darwinian theories, has been shown to have so im- 

 portant a bearing on the solution of difficult questions in animal and 

 vegetable physiology and affinities. I do not here mean the begin- 

 ings of life in the abstract, the supposed creation of organized beings 

 out of nothing in the midst of purely inorganic elements ; that per- 

 tinaciously disputed proposition does not appear to have changed 



LiNif. PEoc. — >Session 1872-73. c 



