54 Anniversary Meeting. [Nov. 30, 



a portion of matter is volatilised and rendered incandescent. As to 

 the tail, the theory long ago suggested by Sir John Herschel has 

 always seemed to me by far the most probable of those that have 

 been advanced, namely, that it is due to the propulsion of excessively 

 attenuated matter, owing to a repulsive force, probably of electrical 

 origin, emanating from the sun. This view seems to be adopted both 

 by Mr. Lockyer and Dr. Huggins ; and the latter gentleman in an 

 earlier Bakerian lecture has suggested a new theory of the corona 

 the corona as distinguished from the prominences namely, that it is 

 projected from the sun by molar forces due to the tremendous state 

 of turmoil, in which we have very strong reason for believing that 

 the matter composing the sun exists, but of matter actually propelled 

 from the sun by a repulsive force in the manner of the tails of comets. 



Daring as some of these speculations may appear to be, there seems 

 a great deal to recommend them, and the whole subject is one of 

 extreme interest at the present day. 



But I must not take up your time longer by dwelling on so 

 special a subject ; I proceed to matters more particularly connected 

 with the occasion on which we are assembled. 



The Council have awarded the Copley Medal of the year to my 

 predecessor in this chair, Mr. Huxley, for his investigations on the 

 morphology and histology of vertebrate and invertebrate animals, and 

 for his services to biological science in general during many past 

 years. These subjects lie so entirely out of the range of my own 

 studies that I need hardly say that in attempting to give some idea of 

 the more salient features of his investigations I am dependent upon 

 the kindness of biological friends. 



During the fifteen or twenty years which preceded the publication 

 of Darwin's famous work, the ' Origin of Species,' the views and 

 methods of comparative anatomists underwent a most marked change. 

 Without that change biologists would have been far less prepared to 

 accept Mr. Darwin's work, and, what is even more important, would 

 have been unprepared to make use of that work as a light enabling 

 them to carry on the remarkable researches which have so brilliantly 

 characterised the progress of biology during the last quarter of a cen- 

 tury. That change was effected chiefly by the labours first of Johannes 

 Miiller, and subsequently of Huxley in this country, and of Gegenbaur 

 in Germany. The labours of these men opened out the right road of 

 morphological inquiry. It is not, perhaps, too much to say that Mr. 

 Huxley's treatment of his subject in his ' Morphology of Cephalous 

 Mollusca ' was to many young morphologists little short of a revela- 

 tion, and all his other works of the same period, such as that on the 

 hydrozoa and on tunicates, and latter still his treatment of the verte- 

 brate skull and skeleton, and arthropoda produced in varying degree 

 a like effect. 



