Transactions of The Royal Society of Canada 



SECTION IV 

 Series IV JUNE AND SEPTEMBER 1917 - Vol. XI 



President'' s Address — Fifty Years of Canadian Zoology. 



By J. Playfair McMurrich, M.A., Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S.C. 

 (Read May Meeting, 1917). 



In this year, the fiftieth anniversary of the Dominion, it has 

 seemed fitting that the Presidential address of Section IV should be 

 devoted to a review of what has been accomplished in Canada towards 

 the progress of those sciences represented in the Section. The field 

 to be covered is too wide and too diverse to be satisfactorily considered 

 in the course of a necessarily limited address, even Vere the speaker 

 Hufîticiently familiar with the various branches of science which here 

 meet on common ground to treat each adequately and in true pers- 

 pective. I maj'^ be pardoned, therefore, and exonerated from any 

 intention of being invidious, if I confine my attention almost altogether 

 to that field of science which I have more expecially cultivated, I mean 

 zoology, confessing at the same time to an inability to do full justice 

 even to the subject so limited. 



It has been said so often that this is an age of specialism, that 

 we have come to think of the modern scientist as cultivating a small 

 plot of ground, definitely circumscribed and isolated, so that, finding 

 sufificient employment for all his energies, he knows not and cares not 

 what his neighbour in an adjoining and similar plot is doing. And we 

 contrast this condition with what obtained in the so-called "good old 

 days" when all the activities now associated in Section IV were com- 

 prised under the heading Natural History. That carries us back, 

 however, to a period prior to that now under consideration, for at a 

 time still antedating our national era Geology became divorced from 

 the other descriptive sciences and it became the custom to speak of 

 Natural History and Geology. This divorce was due to the fact that 

 Geology had become more than merely a descriptive science; Lyell had 

 established a fundamental principle and the problem of the Geologist 

 had become the application of that principle to the explanation of 

 particular cases. Briefly, Geology had become a science in the 

 modern acceptation of that term, but Botany and Zoology were 



Sec. IV. Sig. 1 



