AUGUST 20, 1914] 
NATURE 
635 
training in one or other of its many forms its 
proper place in the school curriculum. 
The author does well to plead for considerable 
liberty in the teaching of these subjects. Freedom 
on the part of the teacher to use his own initia- 
tive and judgment in determining the exercises to 
be given to his pupils is essential, for unless he 
himself is interested in the work in which his 
pupils are engaged, his instruction will prove of 
little value. The author is on equally safe ground 
when he says, “It is not only teachers that call 
out for liberty; local education authorities are be- 
ginning actively to resent the evil of a central 
bureaucracy drawn tighter and tighter.” 
Although the number of text-books and essays 
on manual training already published is very 
large, we believe Mr. Legge’s book will be found 
to be a valuable addition to the works which 
teachers and administrators may usefully con- 
sult. 
THE AUSTRALIAN MEETING OF. THE 
BRITISH... ASSOCIATION. 
INauGURAL ADDRESS By PROF. WILLIAM BaTESON, 
M.A., F.R.S., PRESIDENT. 
Part ].—MELBOURNE. 
Tue outstanding feature of this meeting must be 
the fact that we are here—in Australia. It is the 
function of a president to tell the association of 
advances in science, to speak of the universal rather 
than of the particular or the temporary. There will be 
other opportunities of expressing the thoughts which 
this event must excite in the dullest heart, but it is 
right that my first words should take account of those 
achievements of organisation and those acts of national 
generosity by which it has come to pass that we are 
assembled in this country. Let us, too, on this occa- 
sion, remember that all the effort, and all the goodwill, 
that binds Australia to Britain would have been power- 
less to bring about such a result had it not been for 
those advances in science which have given man a 
control of the forces of nature. For we are here by 
virtue of the feats of genius of individual men of 
science, giant-variations from the common level of 
our species; and since I am going soon to speak of 
the significance of individual variation, I cannot intro- 
duce that subject better than by calling to remem- 
brance the line of pioneers in chemistry, in physics, 
and in engineering, by the working of whose rare 
—or, if you will, abnormal—intellects a 
of the British Association on this side of the globe 
has been made physically possible. 
I have next to refer to the loss within the year of 
Sir David Gill, a former president of this association, 
himself one of the outstanding great. His greatness 
lay in the power of making big foundations. He built 
up the Cape Observatory; he organised international 
geodesy; he conceived and carried through the plans 
for the photography of the whole sky, a work in 
which Australia is bearing a conspicuous part. 
Astronomical observation is now organised on an inter- 
national scale, and of this great scheme Gill was the 
heart and soul. His labours have ensured a base from 
which others will proceed to discovery otherwise im- 
possible. His name will be long remembered with 
veneration and gratitude. 
As the subject of the addresses which I am to deliver 
here and in Sydney I take Heredity. I shall attempt | 
NO. 2338, VOL. 93] 
to give the essence of the discoveries made by Men- 
delian or analytical methods of study, and I shall ask 
you to contemplate the deductions which these physio- 
logical facts suggest in application both to evolutionary 
theory at large and to the special case of the natural 
history of human society. 
Recognition of the significance of heredity is 
modern. The term itself in its scientific sense is no 
older than Herbert Spencer. Animals and plants are 
formed as pieces of living material split from the body 
of the parent organisms. Their powers and faculties 
are fixed in their physiological origin. They are the 
consequence of a genetic process, and yet it is only 
lately that this genetic process has become the subject 
of systematic research and experiment. The curiosity 
_of naturalists has of course always been attracted to 
such problems; but that accurate knowledge of genetics 
is of paramount importance in any attempt to under- 
stand the nature of living things has only been realised 
quite lately even by naturalists, and with casual ex- 
ceptions the laity still know nothing of the matter. 
Historians debate the past of the human species, and 
statesmen order its present or profess to guide its 
future as if the animal man, the unit of their calcula- 
tions, with his vast diversity of powers, were a homo- 
geneous material, which can be multiplied like shot. 
The reason for this neglect lies in ignorance and 
misunderstanding of the nature of variation; for not 
until the fact of congenital diversity is grasped, with 
all that it imports, does knowledge of the system of 
hereditary transmission stand out as a primary neces- 
sity in the construction of any theory of evolution, 
or any scheme of human polity. 
The first full perception of the significance of varia- 
tion we owe to Darwin. The present generation of 
evolutionists realises perhaps more fully than did the 
scientific world in the last century that the theory of 
evolution had occupied the thoughts of many and found 
acceptance with not a few before ever the “Origin” 
appeared. We have come also to the conviction that 
the principle of natural selection cannot have been the 
chief factor in delimiting the species of animals and 
plants, such as we now with fuller knowledge see 
them actually to be. We are even more sceptical as 
to the validity of that appeal to changes in the con- 
ditions of life as direct causes of modification, upon 
| which 
latterly at all events Darwin laid much 
emphasis. But that he was the first to provide a 
body of fact demonstrating the variability of living 
meeting | 
things, whatever be its causation, can never be ques- 
tioned. 
There are some older collections of evidence, chiefly 
the work of the French school, especially of Godron * 
and I would mention also the almost forgotten essay 
of Wollaston 2—these, however, are only fragments in 
comparison. Darwin regarded variability as a property 
| inherent in living things, and eventually we must con- 
sider whether this conception is well founded; but 
| postponing that inquiry for the present, we may declare 
that with him began a general recognition of variation 
as a phenomenon widely occurring in nature. 
If a population consists of members which are not 
alike but differentiated, how will their characteristics 
be distributed among their offspring? This is the 
problem which the modern student of heredity sets out 
to investigate. Formerly it was hoped that by the 
simple inspection of embryological processes the modes 
of heredity might be ascertained, the actual mechanism 
| by which the offspring is formed from the body of the 
parent. In that endeavour a noble pile of evidence 
has been accumulated. All that can be made visible 
by existing methods has been seen, but we come little 
1 “De |’Espéce et des Races dans les Etres Organisés,” 1359. 
2 “On the Variation of Species,” 1856. 
