President's Address. 141 



munication is the meeting room of a Geological Society, or 

 section of a Society, not that of a Zoological or Botanical 

 one. 



True it is, that the study of organic remains affords most 

 valuable assistance to the geologist in his investigations into 

 the history of the earth's crust ; true it is also, that the re- 

 searches of the geologist reciprocally invest such studies with 

 their crowning interest. But true it is, nevertheless, that 

 genuine scientific palaeontology is essentially a part of zoology 

 or botany, as the case may be, and is no more a subordinate 

 department of geology than are the sciences of physics, 

 chemistry, mineralogy, or meteorology, or any other branch 

 of know^ledge which the geologist may call to his aid. The 

 man, who satisfactorily investigates the structure, or deter- 

 mines the systematic position of a fish or reptile preserved in 

 stone, is as much a zoologist as he who describes a similar 

 creature preserved in spirits, though with this difference, that 

 the former task is in some points rather the more difficult, 

 seeing that we have only the hard parts to go upon, and these 

 generally in a crushed, fragmentary, or scattered condition. 

 And without a genuine interest in, as well as a thorough 

 know^ledge of recent biology, no one can hope to produce 

 work of any value in palaeontology. He can only blunder, 

 or, at the best, become a mere manufacturer of so-called 

 genera and species, and such blundering and manufacturing 

 can only tend to bring his subject into disrepute, and to per- 

 petuate that artificial separation between the study of recent 

 and of fossil organisms which is so much to be deplored. 



Viewed in this, as it seems to me, the only proper light, 

 the study of organic remains becomes invested with intense 

 interest. Wonderful indeed is the variety of strange and 

 unaccustomed forms, now no longer living, which the rocks 

 disclose to us. But more than this, if any further light is 

 to be thrown upon the vexed question of Evolution, it is 

 through palaeontology, working hand in hand with recent 

 morphology and embryology, that the light must come. 



And to the student of vertebrate morphology no class can 

 be of greater interest than that of fishes, and among these 

 the strange forms which stand, as it were, on the confines of 



