306 DR. J. D. HOOKERS PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 
address, which we are compelled to give in a condensed form in those parts 
not relating to bot: ill be read with interest, and must be received with 
that indulgence which he himself claims for it. Indeed, in the very outset, 
he himself states some of the objections which may be urged against it e 
gravest, however, he has omitted to mention; and that is, the polemical 
turn displayed when he comes to dwell upon a review on Mr. Darwin's last 
book in the * Athenzum,'—the same review previously commented upon in 
Mr. Bentham's annual address at the Msg LT It is rather TE SC 
that, in their addresses, the presidents of two great scientific bodies like the 
insignificant production as made out, when two eminent men, as Messrs. Bent- 
ham and J. D. Hooker are on all hands acknowledged to be, were for months 
pondering over a refutation of it, to be presented on two separate solemn occa- 
to bodi 
men are dedi to rise ies the level of common Abhi tage life. 
oblige" is a maxim advan usly e. Nor did 
Dr. Hooker prio much ae when he hdd up the Kew Museum, of which 
he is the head, as a model for imitation. Such remarks would have come 
much better, and with more force, from independent sources. On the whole, 
then, Dr. Hooker did not take proper advantage of the is Oppo that 
peeso itself, as will be seen from the abstract we n 
“Thirty years,” said Dr. Hooker, “ will to-morrow deis apis since I first 
attended a meeting of the British Association ; it was the one which opened at 
] 
and it is to this expedition, which was one of the very earliest results of the 
zare of the British Association, that I am indebted for the honour you have 
onferred upon me in pleasing me in your president’s chair. If I now look back 
vith pride to th diately following years, when I Thea a share, however 
small, in the discovery of the Antarctic Continent, the Southern enge ic 
Poles, the Polar Barrier, and the ice-clad Voleano of Victoria Land, I 
sag with other and far different feelings 
e impression is very Fac qid that the Presidential address should 
either be a scientific tour de force, philosophical and popular, or a résumé o 
