THE METHODS AND 



are also of modern invention. There is there- 

 fore a certain fitness in the employment of 

 this occasion for the deliverance of a discourse 

 explaining something of the aims of Genetics 

 and of the methods by which we trust they 

 may be reached. 



You will be aware that the claims put 

 forward in the name of Genetics are high, 

 but I trust to be able to show you that they 

 are not high without reason. It is the 

 ambition of every one who in youth devotes 

 himself to the search for natural truth, that 

 his work may be fouud somewhere in the main 

 stream of progress. So long only as he keeps 

 something of the limitless hope with which 

 his voyage of discovery began, will his courage 

 and his spirit last. The moment we most 

 dread is one in which it may appear that, 

 after all, our effort has been spent in explor- 

 ing some petty tributary, or worse, a back- 

 water of the great current. It is because 



