1868. | The President's Address. 503 
secondly, a distinct collection of the Natural History objects of the 
province. The curator should be able to give elementary demon- 
strations (not formal lectures) to schools and classes visiting the 
museum, for which a fee might be charged. The museum, too, 
should not be a dingy, ill-lighted place, but a bright, cheery building, 
placed if possible in a public park. Dr. Hooker never remembered 
to have heard of a provincial museum that was frequented by 
schools. He believed this did not arise from indifference to know- 
ledge on the part of the upper classes, or of teachers, but to the 
generally uninstructive nature of the contents of these museums and 
their uninviting exterior and interior. He advocated strongly the 
removal of the Natural History collections of the British Museum 
to the townward end of the great parks, where persons might enjoy 
trees, flowers, and fountains after visiting the galleries, instead of as 
now being half stifled in the latter and then escaping only to still 
more dusty and choking streets. 
The President now passed on to speak of recent progress in 
Botany. ‘The researches of Unger on the Continent, and Dawson 
in Canada had greatly added to our knowledge of coal plants, but 
recently Binney and Carruthers had added still more by studying 
the intimate structure of these fossils. The Tertiary flora had 
been studied with great success by Heer, Saporta, Gaudin, and 
others. Dr. Hooker (evidently referring to our own Alum Bay leaf 
beds) did not think much importance could be attached to separated 
leaflets, which were abundant in many Tertiary strata. Three 
genera had been made by one botanist out of three leaflets of the 
single leaf of a plant allied to our blackberries. The greatest 
discoveries in Botany during the past ten years have been physio- 
logical. Dr. Hooker especially alluded to Darwin’s researches on 
the Fertilization of Plants, and to his memoir on Climbing Plants, 
as also to a most important paper by Mr. Herbert Spencer “On the 
Circulation of the Sap and the Formation of Wood in Plants.” 
“The first-fruit of Darwin’s labours was his volume on the 
‘Fertilization of Orchids, undertaken to show that the same plant 
is never continuously fertilized by its own pollen, and that there 
are special provisions to favour the crossing of individuals, As his 
study of the British species advanced, he became so interested in 
the number, variety, and the complexity of the contrivances he met 
with, that he extended his survey to the whole family; and the 
result is a work, of which it is not too much to say, that it has 
thrown more light upon the structure and functions of the floral 
organs of this immense and anomalous family of plants, than had 
been shed by the labours of all previous botanical writers. It has 
further opened up entirely new fields of research, and discovered 
new and important principles, that apply to the whole vegetable 
kingdom. 
