108 ORGANISATION 



of retrospect over the preceding year's scientific 

 advancements, possibly of anticipation of the advan- 

 tages to accrue from the meeting it was inaugu- 

 rating, became what it still is, the principal public 

 scientific pronouncement of the year. Out of this 

 condition grew the impression to which Hooker re- 

 ferred in his address in 1868, 'that the address should 

 either be a scientific tour deforce, philosophical, and 

 popular, or a resume of the progress of one or more 

 important branches of science.' Hooker, it may be 

 added, disclaimed ability ' to fulfil either of these 

 requirements,' although the disclaimer was possibly 

 discounted when he proceeded : 



* I propose to offer you some remarks upon several 

 matters to which the attention of your committee 

 was directed when at Dundee, and then upon some 

 of the great advances that have been made in botany 

 during the last few years ; this will infallibly drag 

 me into Darwinism : after which I shall allude to 

 some matters connected with that dawning science, 

 the Early History of Mankind.' 



Hooker, therefore, did not fall much short of 

 the standard demanded by the second alternative 

 ' impression ' to which he referred. As to the first, 

 the tour de force, as he termed it, he had in mind, no 

 doubt, the type of address in which leaders of scientific 

 thought have made suggestions, or brought forward 

 theories, not necessarily associated directly with 

 their own labours, but bearing upon some common 

 subject or aspect of daily life, and therefore to be 

 seized upon by the unscientific hearer or reader 

 as a matter understandable and debatable. Thus 

 Armstrong, in 1863, took occasion to estimate the 



