302 



NATURE 



{August i6, 1877 



ments for that day. Tickets for this excursion will be 

 freely given to a limited number of members, but none 

 can be issued after Friday the 17th instant. 



4. On the same day there will be a dredging excursion 

 in Plymouth Sound and offing, under the direction of the 

 Plymouth Institution. As this district is particularly rich 

 in the Crustacea, echinodermata, and the rarer southern 

 fauna, there will no doubt be many applicants for tickets. 

 The boats for this excursion will leave Mill Bay pier at 

 ten o'clock, and the number of the tickets, which must 

 be applied for before twelve o'clock on Friday, will be 

 limited to fifty. 



The excursions for Thursday, the 23rd inst., will consist 

 of the following : — 



1. Up the River Tamar to visit the Great Devon 

 Consols Copper Mines. 



2. To Liskeard, the Cheese-Wring, and the Phoenix 

 and South Carradon Tin Mines. 



3. To Totnes, Torquay, and Brixham, including visits 

 to Kent's Cavern, to the Brixham Caves and the experi- 

 mental works of Mr. Froude at Chelston Cross. 



4. To Penryn, Falmouth, Penzance, and the Land's 

 End. 



For the first two of these excursions applications for 

 tickets, which are limited, must be made before noon of 

 Wednesday, the 22nd. The Totnes and Torquay excur- 

 sion is by special invitation of the chairman of the TorqSay 

 Local Board of Health, on behalf of the inhabitants of 

 the town, and, as such, is of a semi-privite nature. 



The " Red Lion " dinner, which is now almost as great 

 an institution as [the British Association itself, will come 

 off on Tuesday next, at five o'clock, at Farley's Menagerie, 

 Union Street. 



As we intimated last week, Mr. John Edward Henry 

 Gordon, B.A., late of Cambridge, has been appointed as 

 the successor to Mr. Griffith. Mr. Griffith will, however, 

 retain office until the Dublin meeting, Mr. Gordon being 

 his assistant for the year, after which Mr. Gordon will be 

 fully installed as Assistant General Secretary. 



Inaugural Address of Prof. Allkn Thomson, M.D., 

 LL.D., F.R.S., F.R.S.E., President. 



After the long interval of six-and-thirty years the British 

 Association for the Advancement of Science holds its annual 

 meeting, the forty-seventh since its foundation, in this beautiful 

 and interesting locality ; and, strangely enough, on this occasion 

 as on the former, it passes from Glasgow to Plymouth. We are 

 delighted to be assembled here, and are even surprised that 

 the Association has been able so long to resist the power of 

 attraction by which it has been gravitating towards this place. 

 While we are prepared to be charmed by the surpassing beauty 

 of its scenery, and know the deep interest of its prehistoric 

 vtstiges, its historic memories, and its artistic associations, we 

 have been frequently reminded of its scientific vigilance by the 

 records of its active scientific work ; and we are now ready and 

 anxious to witness all we can behold of its energy and success in 

 the application of scientitic discovery to the practical arts. 

 Should we, as might be expected in a place hitlierto so famous 

 in its relations to our naval and military history, find most pro- 

 minent those relating to the mechanism of war, we shall still 

 hope that the effect of greater perfection in the engines of de- 

 struction may only be the means of rendering peace more per- 

 manent and secure. 



It is a source of regret to myself, and may be, I fear, a 

 cause of detriment to this meeting that the choice of a Presi- 

 dent should have fallen upon one whose constant occupa- 

 tion with very special branches of science has fitted him so 

 inadequ.ately for the distinguished position to which he lias been 

 called. I cair only derive comfort from knowing that, wherever 

 it may be necessary, there are many others present most able to 

 supply what may be wanting on my part ; and I must, therefore, 

 at once bespeak their assistance and your indulgence. 



I have selected for the subject of the remarks which I am 

 about to offer for your acceptance a biological topic, namely, the 

 " Development of tlie Forms of Animal Life," with which my 

 studies have been occupied, and which has important bearings 

 on some of the more interesting biological questions now agitating 

 the scientific world. But before proceeding with the discussion 



of my sjiecial subject, it is my desire to call your attention shortly 

 to the remarkable change in the manner of viewing biological 

 questions which has taken place in this country durnig the last 

 half century — a change so great, indeed, that it can scarcely be 

 fully appreciated except by those who have lived through the 

 period of its occurrence. 



In the three earlier decades of this century it was the common 

 belief, in this country at least, shared by men of science as well 

 as by the larger body of persons who had given no special atten- 

 tion to the subject, that the various forms of plants and animals 

 recognized by naturalists in their systematic arrangements of 

 genera and species were permanently lixed and unalterable ; that 

 tliey were not subject to greater changes than might occur as 

 occasional variations, and that such was the tendency to the 

 maintenance of uniformity in their specific characters that, when 

 varieties did arise, there was a natural disposition to the return, 

 in the course of succeeding generations, to the fixed form and 

 nature supposed to belong to the parental stock ; and it was also 

 a necessary part of this view of the permanency of species that 

 each was considered to have been originally produced from an 

 individual having the exact form which its descendants ever after- 

 wards retained. To this scientific dogma was further added the 

 quasi-religious view that in the exercise of infinite wisdom and 

 goodness, the Creator, when He called the successive species of 

 plants and animals into existence, conferred upon each precisely 

 the organization and the properties adapting it best for the kind 

 of life for which it was designed in the general scheme of creation. 

 This was the older doctrine of "Direct Creation," of " Teleo- 

 logical Relation," and of " Final Causes " ; and those only who 

 have known the firm hold which such views had over the public 

 mind in past times can understand the almost unqualified appro- 

 bation with which the reasoning on these questions in writings 

 like the Bridgewater Treatises (not to mention older books on 

 Natural Theology) were received in their time, as well as the 

 very opposite feelings excited by every work which presented a 

 different view of the plan of creation. 



On the continent of Europe, it is true, some bold speculators, 

 such as Goethe, Oken, Lamarck, and Geoffroy St. Hilaire, had 

 in the end of the last and commencement of this century broached 

 the doctrine that there is in living beings a continuous series of 

 gradations as well as a consistent and general plan of organiza- 

 tion ; and that tfie creation, therefore, or origin of the different 

 forms of plants and animals must have been the result of a 

 gradual process of development or of derivation one from another, 

 the whole standing connected together in certain causal relations. 

 But in Britain such views, though known and not altogetlier re- 

 pulsive to a few, obtained little favour, and, by some strange 

 process of reasoning, were looked upon by the great majority as 

 little short of impious questionings of the supreme power of the 

 Almighty. 



How different is the position of matters in this respect in our 

 day ! — when the cautious naturalist receives and adopts with the 

 greatest reserve the statement of fixed and permanent specific 

 characters as belonging to the different fonns of organized beings, 

 and is fully persuaded of the constant tendency to variation which 

 all species show even in the present condition of the earth, and 

 of the still greater liability to change which must have existed in 

 the earlier periods of its formation — when the belief prevails 

 that so far from being the direct product of distinct acts of 

 creation, the various forms of plants and animals have been 

 gradually evolved in a slow gradation of increasing complexity ; 

 and when it is recognized by a large majority of naturalists that 

 the explanation of this wonderful relation of connection between 

 previously existing and later forms is to be found in the constant 

 tendency to variation during development and growth, and the 

 perpetuation of such variations by hereditary transmission through 

 successive generations in the long but incalculable lapse of tiie 

 earth's natural mutations. These, as you must all be aware, are in 

 their essential features the views now known as Darwinism, which 

 were first simultaneously brought forward by Wallace and Darwin 

 in 1S5S, and which, after being more lully elaborated in the works 

 of the latter and ably supported by the former, secured, in the 

 incredibly.short space of ten or twelve years, the general approval 

 of a large portion of the scientific world. The change of opinion 

 is, in fact, now such that there are few scientific works on Natural 

 History, whether of a special or more general character, in which 

 the relation which the facts of science bear to the newer doc- 

 trines is not carefully pointed out ; that, with the general public 

 too, the words " Evolution " and " Development " have ceased 

 to excite the feelings, amounting almost to horror, which they at 



