II 
Hbstract of Proceedings, 
1907. 
$9O0OOS4H 
GENERAL MEETINGS. 
Friday, January 4th. Sir Samuel Wilks, Bt., M.D., F.R.S., 
President, in the chair. 
Miss Marie C, Stopes, D,Sc,, Ph.D., gave a lecture entitled 
“Some Missing Links in the Plant World,”’’ illustrated with 
lantern slides. The lecturer first pointed out the real meaning 
of the popular expression, “‘ Missing Link.’ It denotes a race 
of organisms now extinct, which were in a-distant past the remote 
ancestors of two or more races living at the present day which 
present characters distinct from one another. No living monkey 
is a “missing link” with man. The term would be correctly 
applied to an ape-like ancestor of man forming a link between 
the present races of man and the apes. Just as the people of 
to-day are the direct descendants of old families, some of which 
have prospered greatly, while others may have become extremely 
reduced and even died out, so in the plant world all the families 
of plants to-day living are the representatives of the many ancient 
families which have inhabited the earth in time past. In these 
lost families, which we now know only as fossils, are to be found 
proofs of “ blood relationship” between families now living which 
we should never imagine to be connected. In the rocks of all 
ages some records of plants are to be found; but most of these 
are very fragmentary, except in the period of the coal measures. 
Slides were shown illustrating the perfection of the preservation 
of plant tissues from these beds. In many cases the minute 
anatomy shown by these sections is as well ascertainable as by 
sections from living plants. Among the plants of this age which 
we know specially well is the giant Lepidodendron, the remote 
ancestor of our small present day ‘“‘club mosses.” Slides were 
shown of the structure of this plant, illustrating its likenesses 
to and differences from the living club mosses. In this case the 
course of evolution had been one of degeneration rather than of 
progress. A second example from the coal measures was described 
in*Calamites, the huge representative of the present day water 
