SECTION D. 
BIOLOGY. 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 
. By W. B. Benuam, President, D.Sc. (Lond.), M.A. (Oxon), 
F.Z.S., Professor of Biology in the Otago University, 
New Zealand. 
THE GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF EARTH- 
WORMS AND THE PALAOGEOGRAPHY OF 
THE ANTARCTIC REGION. 
[ Plates. ] 
Tue study of the geographical distribution of organisms, 
or Biogeography, as it has been called, has in recent years 
given rise to such interesting problems in regard to the 
former disposition of land and sea, that it needs, I think, no 
apology from me if I take some facts about the distribution 
of animals as the subject of my address to the Biological 
Section. 
It has long been a matter of common knowledge, and is 
a familiar fact to everyone who has travelled, that the 
animals and plants in different parts of the world are more 
or less different. The organisms found in Europe are quite 
distinct from those natural to Australia; but what perhaps 
is less generally appreciated, is the striking difference, in re- 
spect of their native fauna and flora, between Australia and 
New Zealand. 
In the early decades of the 19th century, when the teleo- 
logical views of Paley held sway, this fact, that different 
continents harbour different kinds of animals, meant 
nothing beyond the fact that “the world was fitted to its 
inhabitants so well that it was obviously made for them, 
down to the minutest detail.” But how differently we view 
the subject now, thanks to the light shed upon it by Charles 
Darwin. By his theory of Natural Selection, he led men 
to recognise that the fitness of this earth to its inhabitants 
results, not from its being made for them, but from the 
organisms having been, so to speak, shaped by it. 
It is my intention, then, to discuss the geographical dis- 
tribution of certain earthworms, and to indicate some of the 
problemsof the former geographical relations of those oceans 
