530 
NATURE 
[SEPTEMBER 25, 1902 
Niphosura) is the nearest expression of the truth. It becomes 
thereby the more regrettable that in a recent revision of the 
taxonomy of the Limuloids the generic name Carcinoscorpius 
should have found a place. 
I foresee the objection that the antenniform condition of the 
shorter limbs may be secondary and due to change. There is 
no proof of this. Against it, it may be said that the number of 
the segments is normal, and that where nature effects such a 
-change, elongation is with the multi-articulate state the only 
process known; as, for example, with the second leg of the 
Phrynidee, the so called second pareiopod of the Polycarpidea 
and the last abdominal appendage of Apseudes. 
That advances such as we have now considered should lead 
to new departures is a necessity of the case; and it but remains 
for me to remind you that within the last decade statistical and 
experimental methods have very properly come more prominently 
into vogue, in the desire to solve the problems of variation and 
heredity. Of the statistical method, by no means new, I have 
‘but time to recall to you the Presidential Address of 1898 by my 
friend and predecessor in this chair, himsell a pioneer ; and of 
the experimental method I can but cite an example, and that a 
most satisfactory one, justifying our confidence and support. It 
‘concerns the late Prof, Milne-Edwards, who in 1864 described, 
from the Paris Museum, the head of a rock lobster (Pa/inurus 
Penwcillatus), having on the left side an antenniform eye-stalk. 
With the perspicuity distinctive of his race, he argued in favour 
of the ‘* fundamental similarity of parts susceptible to revert to 
their opposite states.” The matter remained at this till, on the 
removal of the ophthalmite of certain Crustacea, it was found 
that in regeneration it assumes a uniramous multiarticulate form ; 
and it is an interesting circumstance that in the common cray- 
4ish the biramous condition normal to the antennule may occur. 
An example this of a fact which no other method could explain. 
When all is said and done, however, it is to the morphological 
method that I would appeal as most trustworthy and sound. And 
when we find (1) that in ce:tain compound Tunicates the atrial 
wall, in the egg development delimited by a pair of ectoblastic 
invaginations, in the bud development may be formed from the 
parental endodermic branchial sac ; (2) that regenerated organs 
are by no means derivative of the blastemata whence they origin- 
ally arose ; (3) that in the development of a familiar star-fish 
the inner cells of the earliest segmentation stages, by intercala- 
tion among the outer, contribute half the fully-formed blastula ; 
44) that there are Diptera in existence in which, while it is 
well-nigh impossible to discriminate between the adult forms, 
there is reason to believe the pupa cases are markedly and con- 
stantly distinct ; it becomes only too evident that the later 
embryonic and adult states are those most trustworthy for all 
purposes of comparison, and that it is by these that our animals 
can best be known and judged. Caution is, however, necessary 
with senility and age, since certain skulls have been found to 
assume at this period characters and proportions strikingly 
abnormal, and by virtue of the most important discovery, which 
we owe to the Japanese, that in certain Holothurians the 
calcareous skeletal deposits may so change with age as to 
render specific diagnoses based on their presumed immutability 
invalid. Advance, real and progressive, is in no department of 
zoological inquiry better marked than comparative morphology, 
and it is for the preeminence of this that I would plead. Edu- 
cationally, it affords a mental discipline second to none. 
We live by ideas, we advance by a knowledge of facts, content 
to discover the meaning of phenomena, since the nature of things 
will be for ever beyond our grasp. 
And now my task is done, except that I feel that we must not 
leave this place without a word of sympathy and respect for the 
memory of one of its sons, an earnest devotee to our cause. 
William Thompson, born in Belfast, 1806, became in due time 
known as ‘‘the father of Irish natural history.” By his writings 
on the Irish fauna, and his numerous additions to its lists, he 
secured for himself a lasting fame. In his desire to benefit 
others, he early associated himself with the work of the Natural 
History Society, which still flourishes in this city. He was 
President of this Section in 1843, and died in London in 1852, 
while in the service of our Association, in his forty-seventh year, 
beloved by all who knew him. His memory still survives; and 
if, as a result of this meeting, we can inspire in the members of 
the Natural History and Philosophie Society of this city, as it 
is now termed, and of its Naturalists’ Field Club an enthusiasm 
qual to his, we shall not have assembled in vain. 
NO. 1717, VOL. 66] 
SECTION G. 
ENGINEERING. 
OPENING AppREss BY PROF. JOHN PERRY, M.E., D.Sc., 
LL.D., F.R.S., PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION, 
TuHIs Section has had sixty-six Presidents, all different types 
of engineer. As each has had perfect freedom in choosing the 
subject for his Address, and each has known of the rule! that 
Presidential Addresses are not subject to debate afterwards, and 
as, being an engineer, he has always been a man of originality, 
of course he has always chosen a subject outside his own work. 
An engineer knows that the great inventions, the great sugges- 
tions of change in any profession, come from outsiders. Lawyers 
seem like fish out of water when trying to act as law-makers. 
The radical change that some of us hope to see before we die in 
the construction of locomotives will certainly not come from a 
locomotive superintendent who cannot imagine a locomotive 
which is not somehow a lineal descendant of the Rocket. 
Hence it is that in almost every case the President of this 
Section has devoted a small or Jarge part of his Address to the 
subject of the education of engineers. I grant that every Presi- 
dent has devoted his life to the education of one engineer— 
himself—and it is characteristic of engineers that their profes- 
sional education proceeds throughout the whole of their 
lives. Perhaps of no other man can this be said so com- 
pletely. To utilise the forces of Nature, to combat Nature, to 
comprehend Nature as a child comprehends its mother, this is 
the pleasure and the pain of the engineer. A mere scientific 
man analyses Nature; takes a phenomenon, dissects it into its 
simpler elements, and investigates these elements separately in 
his laboratory. The engineer cannot do this. He must take 
Nature as she is, in all her exasperating complexity. He must 
understand one of Nature’s problems as a whole. He must have 
all the knowledge of the scientific man, and ever so much more. 
He uses the methods of the scientific man, and adds to them 
methods of his own. The name given to these scientific methods 
of his own or their results is sometimes ‘‘ common-sense,” 
sometimes ‘‘character,” or ‘‘ individuality,” or ‘‘ faculty,” or 
““business ability,” or ‘‘instinct.” They come to him through 
a very wide experience of engineering processes, of acquaintance 
with things and men. No school or college can do more than 
prepare a young man for this higher engineering education which 
lasts through life. Without it a man follows only iule of 
thumb, like a sheep following the bell-wether, or else he lets 
his inventiveness or love of theory act the tyrant. 
When a man has become a great gngineer and he is asked 
how it happened, what his education has been, how young 
engineers ought to be trained, as a rule it is a question that he 
is least able to answer, and yet it is a question that he is most 
ready to answer. He sees that he benefited greatly by over- 
coming certain difficulties in his life; and forgetting that every 
boy will have difficulties enough of his own, forgetting that 
although a few difficulties may be good for discipline many 
difficulties may be overwhelming, forgetting also that he him- 
self is a very exceptional man, he insists upon it that those diffi- 
culties which were personal to himself ought to be thrown in 
the path of every boy. It often happens that he is a man who 
is accustomed to think that early education can only be given 
through ancient classics. He forgets the dulness, the weariness 
of his schooldays. Whatever pleasure he had in youth— 
pleasure mainly due to the fact that the average Anglo-Saxon 
boy invents infinite ways of escaping school drudgery—he some- 
how connects with the fact that he had to learn classics. Being 
an exceptional boy, he was not altogether stupefied and did not 
altogether lose his natural inclination to know something of his 
own language ; and he is in the habit of thinking that he learnt 
English through Latin, and that ancient classics are the best 
mediums through which an English boy can study anything.? 
1 The Committees of Sections G and L have arranged a discussion on 
“The Education of Engineers,” this Address being regarded as opening 
the discussion. Thus the rule is not in force this year. 
* Of all the unskilled labour of the present day, surely that of the modern 
poet is the most grotesque. How much more powerful and powerless man 
seems to ws now; how much more wonderful is the universe than it was to 
the ancients! Yet our too learned poets prefer to copy and recopy the senti- 
ments of the ancients rather than try to see the romance which fills the lives 
of engineers and scientific men with joy. ‘ 
3 The very people who talk so much of learning English through Latin 
neglect in the most curious ways those Platt-Deutsch languages, Dutch and 
Scandinavian, a knowledge of which isten times more valuable in the study 
of what is becoming the speech of the world. And how they do scorn Low- 
land Scotch ! 
