BOTANICAL ADDRESS TO THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 175 
fact that the large majority of men of the last generation who 
have won distinction in this field have begun their career 
with the study of medicine. That the kind of training that 
Natural History studies give is of advantage to students of 
medicine which, rightly regarded, is itself a Natural History 
study, can hardly be denied. But the exigencies of the 
medical curriculum have crowded them out: and this, I am 
afraid, must be accepted as irremediable. I cannot refrain 
from reading you, on this point, an extract from a letter 
which I have received from a distinguished official lately 
entrusted with an important foreign mission. I should add 
that he had himself been trained in the old way. 
‘I have had my time, and must leave to younger men the 
delight of working these interesting fields. Such chances 
never will occur again, for roads are now being made and 
ways cut in the jungle and forest, and you have at hand all 
sorts of trees level on the ground ready for study. These 
bring down with them orchids, ferns, and climbers of many 
kinds, including rattan palms, ete. But, excellent as are the 
officers who devote their energy to thus opening up this 
country, there is not one man who knows a palm from a 
dragon-tree, so the chance is lost. Strange to say, the 
medical men of the Government service know less and care 
less for Natural History than the military men, who at least 
regret they have no training or study to enable them to take 
an intelligent interest in what they see around them. A 
doctor nowadays cares for no living thing larger or more 
complicated than a bacterium or a bacillus.’ 
But there are other and even more serious grounds why 
the present dominance of one aspect of our subject is a 
matter for regret. In the concluding chapter of the 
‘Origin, Darwin wrote; ‘I look with confidence to. the 
future—to young and rising naturalists.’ But I observe 
that most of the new writers on the Darwinian theory, and 
oddly enough, especially when they have been trained at 
Cambridge, generally begin by more or less rejecting it as a 
theory of the origin of species, and then proceed unhesita- 
