THE 



MONTHLY MICROSCOPICAL JOURNAL. 



MARCH 1, 1873. 



L— ANNUAL ADDRESS FROM THE PRESIDENT. 



{Read before the Eotal Microscopical Society, Feb. 5, 1873.) 



Gentlemen, — I am permitted by the Council to speak to you to- 

 night of things within my own measure; for, working within a 

 very limited territory, I have no power or leisure for expatiating on 

 other men's labours. So far as I become acquainted with the 

 results produced by the working of a thousand excellent labourers, 

 I rejoice ; but my limitations are too strict for me to become an 

 annalist even in my own department. 



Besides this, long-continued labour in one particular direction 

 tends to give the mind somewhat of a narrow and exclusive charac- 

 ter, from the habit of obliviousness which is acquired by any man 

 who keeps for year after year one train of ideas in his mind. 

 Besides this I have the misfortune to have a cat-like nature — I 

 must scent out my game for myself, and do not readily receive hints 

 from others. The creature I have referred to, as you all know, 

 escheweth change of place ; so also do I, and thus lose many excel- 

 lent opportunities of learning from my fellow- workers. In this 

 hermit-like scientific life, I have lost much time and labour ; dig- 

 ging over acre after acre to find what would have turned up much 

 sooner had I possessed the dog-like qualities of more ready men, 

 who take the least hint, and catch at suggestions by instinct. After 

 all, I suppose, this is as it should be; for the human species is, 

 within its own boundary, an epitome of the whole animal world 

 beneath it, and nature, abhorrent of uniformity, has evidently 

 intended man to break up into ten thousand varieties and sub- 

 varieties. My own idiosyncrasy is merely mentioned as an apology 

 for the restricted character of this Address, which is the result of 

 the necessary limitation of my researches ; he who will observe 

 every flower bordering his footpath, will miss much of the extended 

 scenery around him. My own line of research is the growth, as of 

 a plant or flower, of those animal forms which, like us, possess a 

 vertebral column ; and I search in them, even in the lowest, for the 

 pattern and type of our own form, which is the highest of all. But, 

 as the field is far too wide for any single worker — the labourers are 

 few, but there is work for thousands — I am fain to restrict my own 

 work to one part of the vertebrated animal, its head. And, indeed, 



VOL. IX. I 



