( CXV ) 



and fixed habits indicating their ancestral history and affecting 

 their present capabilities. 



Darwin, in some of the earliest pages of his famous wprk on 

 " The Origin of Species," * remarks on our px'o found ignorance 

 in regard to the mutual relation of the many beings which 

 live around us, and asks who can explain why one species 

 ranges widely and is very numerous, and why another allied 

 species has a narrow range and is rare. 



Notwithstanding the great advances made since those words 

 were written we must admit that in the vast majority of cases, 

 if our explanation is to be founded on actual knowledge of facts 

 as distinguished from more or less well-founded conjecture, 

 these questions are rather to be echoed than answered. 



We may accept Darwin's position that, in the form a 

 living creature presents, with certain important exceptions t 

 " its structure either now is or was formerly of some direct or 

 indirect use to its possessor," or, as the position is stated by 

 Wallace, that every " truly specific character is or has been 

 useful or is strictly correlated with such a character ; " J but 

 what we know of the actual processes by which these general 

 causes have produced that which we see around us is recog- 

 nised as exceedingly small in comparison with what we do not 

 know. 



The capacity for adding materially to the splendid general- 

 isations of Darwin and Wallace, and of their distinguished 

 successors in several departments of natural history, is not 

 given to many, but the field of unexplored observation is 

 almost infinite in extent and variety, so that many of us can 

 gather facts that may help to solve some of the problems that 

 exist. 



Except in certain very limited investigations, there is 

 probably nothing I can place before you that is not already 

 known. But it has seemed to me that, without hoping to add 



* Sixth Edition, p. 6. 



t Such as are caused by the definite action of external conditions, 

 so-called spontaneous variations, and the complex laws of growth — "Origin 

 of Species," p. 254. 



X "Darwinism," and Journ. Linn. Soc, Dec. 1896, vol. xxv, p. 496, 

 as cited by Professor Meldola in his Presidential Address to this Society in 

 1896, Proceedings, p. Ixix, the correlation, as explained, p. Ixx not being 

 limited to such characters as are structural. 



