PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 
The Progress of Biology 
At the last meeting of The Royal Society I conveyed my thanks 
to the members for the honour done me in electing me as their Presi- 
dent. In the interval the responsibility of the position has not weighed 
heavily upon me; our admirable secretary, on account of his residence 
in Ottawa, having been able to relieve me of most of the routine duties. 
Indeed, I only began to realize this responsibility when it became 
necessary to prepare the customary presidential address. 
The selection of a subject did not present any difficulty. It 
seemed fairly obvious that I should attempt a review of progress in 
the Science which I profess and hence the title which appears on the 
programme. My first idea was to endeavour to summarize the attain- 
ments of Biology during the period of my professoriate, that is, from 
1874 to the present time. But I soon realized that I must content 
myself with a more modest task, for the various branches of Biology 
have assumed a different position both as regards methods of teaching 
and their share in educational programmes in Schools and Universities 
in the last thirty years and their practical applications have been found 
to be more universal than was dreamt of. The result is that a great 
army of teachers and investigators came intoexistence which had nothing 
to compare with it previously. | 
In illustration of this increased activity I would mention that the 
Zoological Record in 1874 (to take as an example the department of 
Biology in which I have been most interested) reviewed contributions 
from 250 journals, while the last volume of the Record similarly quotes 
some 1,600 of these. And the literature of other branches has grown 
in the same proportion, so that the biologist desirous of surveying 
the whole field of the science of life finds it more and more difficult 
to get a comprehensive view. 
I decided therefore, instead of endeavouring to picture the 
recent achievements of those branches of Biology which had already 
been well-established by the middle of the 19th century, to restrict 
myself rather to calling your attention to certain new sciences which 
have arisen within the biological domain and which owe their special 
development to this recent period. The development of these has led 
to new institutions, new laboratories, new professorships which for- 
merly did not exist. 
