Dec. 6, 18S3] 



A'.4 TURE 



137 



1 now \m^ leave to bring undei' your notice a btief general 

 review of the work of the Society during the past year. 



The papers printed in the Tta>Lsactioiis for 1882 and 1S83 

 will occupy two volunes, of which three parts, containing 1038 

 quarto pages and fifty-two plates, have already been published. 

 Two parts mure, to complete 1SS3, will shortly be published. 



The Proceedings, which steadily increase in size from year to 

 year, amount during the past year to 7S0 octavo pages, with four 

 plates and numerous engravings. 



You are auare that nothing is printed in the Proceedings or in 

 the Transaclions except by the authority of the Council, which, 

 in the latter case, calls in the assistance of at least two carefully- 

 selected and independent referees, by whose advice it is in prac- 

 tise, thoujh n')t necessarily, guided. 1 am inclined to think 

 that Fellows of this Society who do not happen to have served 

 on the Council, are little aware of the ami u^t, or of the value of 

 the conscientious labour which is thus performed for the Society 

 by gentlemen whose names do not appear in our records. And 

 I trust I may be forgiven for stepping beyond precedent so far 

 as to offer our thanks for work which is always troublesome and 

 often ungrateful ; but, without which, the contributions to our 

 pages would not maintain the high average of excellence Mhii;h 

 they possess. 



Among the points of importance, by reason of their novelty or 

 general signilicance, which have been laid before us, much 

 interest attaches to the result brought out in Prof. Osborne 

 Reynolds's " Experimental Investigation or the circuinstances 

 which determine whether the nijtion of water shall be direct or 

 sinuous, and of the law of resistance in parallel channels ; " 

 which shows that when the conditions of dynamical similarity 

 are satisfied, two systems, involving fluids treated as viscous, 

 may be com^^ared (as ret^ards their effv;cts) even when the 

 motions are un.tible ; and that if any one of the two systems is 

 in the critical state separating stability from instability, so will 

 be the other. 



Last December, Dr. Huggins presented a note on " A Method 

 of Photographing the Solar Corona w ithout an Eclipse," which 

 had so far proved successful, under the unfavourable circum- 

 stances in which he had put it in practice, as to lead to the hope 

 that, under better conditions of atmosphere and elevation, the 

 corona might hi photographed, from day to day, with so much 

 accuracy as to preserve a clear record of the changes which it 

 undergoes. And, as the photographs taken during the eclipse 

 at Caroline Island sh )W a condition of the corona, intermediate 

 between those exhibited by Dr. Huggins's photographs at periods 

 antecedent and subsequent to the Caroline I-land observ.itions, 

 there is reason to believe that this hope is well based, and that a 

 new and powerful method of investigation has been placed in 

 the hands of students of solar physics. 



Lord Rayleigh and his sisterin-Uw, Mrs. Sidgwick, have 

 made a very ila'oorate determination of the relation between the 

 ohm and the British Association standard of electrical resistance. 

 With respect to those branches of knowledge on which I may 

 venture to offer an opinion of my own, I may say thai, though 

 our records show much useful and praise Aorihy work in bio- 

 logical science, the only event which appears to me to call 

 for special remark is the opening of an attack upon a problear 

 of very great interest, one which, in fact, goes to the root of the 

 question of the fundamental unity of the two great embodiments 

 of life — plants and animals. 



The well-known phenomena presented by many plants, such 

 as the sensitive plant and the sun-dew, our knowledge of which 

 was so vastly extended by Darw in, abundantly prove that the 

 property of irritability, that is, the reaction of a living part, by 

 change of form, upon the application of a stimulus to that part, 

 or to some other part in living continuity with it, is not confined 

 to animals. 



But, in animals, the connection of the part irritated with that 

 which changes its form is always effected by a continuity of more 

 or less modified protoplasmic substance, and reaction takes place 

 only so long as that continuity i^ unimpaired; while, hitherto, 

 the protoplasmic cell-bodies of plants have appeared to be iso- 

 lated from one another by the non-protoplasmic cell-walls in 

 which they are inclosed. 



It is as if, in the one case, there was a continuous bond of 

 conducting substance between the point of irritation and the 

 point of contraction ; while, in the other, there was a chain of 

 pellets of protoplasmic substance, each inclosed in a coat of a 

 different nature. 

 Now, Mr. Gardiner, in his paper "On the continuity of the 



Protoplas.-n through the Walls of Vegetable Cells," brings 

 forward evidence, based chiefly upon the careful use of special 

 reagents, that, in the sensitive cushions of certain plants and in 

 other situations, the vegetable cell-wall is pierced by minute 

 apertures, and that these are traversed by threads of protoplasm, 

 which connect the cell-body of each cell with those of its neigh- 

 bour, and thus establish, as in animals, a continuity of proto- 

 plasmic snb.tance between different parts. Other observers are 

 working at the same sulijcct, and we may hope that, before long, 

 great light w ill be thrown upon many hitherto puzzling questions 

 in vegetable physiology. 



The Committee of the Royal Society, in the hands of which 

 the Lords of the Treasury ha;ve placed the administration of the 

 funds devoted to the publication of the work of the Challenger 

 expedition, report that, under the careful and vigorous direction 

 of Mr. Murray, this great undertaking is making rapid progress. 



Mr. Murray informs me that thirty-eight reports have, up to 

 this time, been published, forming eight large qurrto volumes, 

 with 4x95 pages of lettcrprcs.s, 4SS lithogi'aphic plates and other 

 illustrations. Thirty-four of these memoirs are on zoological, 

 four on physical subjects. Nine reports are now nearly all in 

 type, and some of them partly printed off. Thee will be pub- 

 lished within three months, and will form three zoological 

 volumes, with 230 plates and many woodcuts, and one physical 

 volume, with many diagrams and maps ; this latter volume will 

 contain the report on the composition of ocean water, the specific 

 gravity and temperature observations. 



A considerable part of the general narrative of the cruise is 

 now in type, and ncirly all the illuslraiions are prepared. The 

 narr.itive will extend to t.vo volumes, and it is expected they will 

 be ready for is.sue in May or June, 1884. 



The work connected with the remaining forly two special 

 reports i-, in most instances, progressing satisfactorily. Portions 

 of the manuscript for three of the larger memoirs have been 

 received and put i.i type, and the manuscript of many others is 

 in a f irward slate. For these ujemoiis, 3S6 lithographic plites 

 have been pi inted off and delive.ed to the binders; 404 o'hers 

 are now on stone, and the drawings for many more are being 

 prepared. It is estimated that the whole work connected with 

 the Report will be comoleted in the summer of 1887. 



In his Address, last year, the President gave the Society a full 

 account of tlie changes which had taken place in the administra- 

 tion of the Government Fund — technically termed a grant in aid 

 of this Society — though, as you are aware, the Royal Society, 

 while willingly accepting the burden and the responsibility of 

 administrator of the aid granted by the State to science, is in no 

 sense pecuniiirily benefited by the grant. 



A somew hat novel and extremely useful employment has been 

 given to part of the fund by deciding to defray the expenses of 

 adequately skilled persons who have undertaken to visit distant 

 countries for the purpose of investigating certain interesting 

 biological questions on the spot, and of procuring and transmit- 

 ting to observers at home specimens prepared and preserved by 

 those refined modern methods which can be satisfactorily carried 

 out only by persons who are w ell versed in the practice 'if such 

 methods. 



Mr. Adam Sedgwick has thus been enabled to proceed to the 

 Cape of Good Hope for the purpose of completing our know- 

 ledge of the singular genus Peripatus, so well studied by Prof. 

 Moseley, and afterwards by our lamented Fellow, Balfour ; and 

 Mr. Caldwell, similarly aided, is now in Australia, devoting 

 himself to the elucidation of the embryology of the marsupial 

 quadrupeds of that region, a subject of which at present we 

 know little more than was made knoun in the Transactions of 

 this Society half a century ago by Prof. Owen. 



It certainly was high time that British science should deal with 

 a problem of the profoundest zoological interest, the materials 

 for the solution of which abound in, and are at the same time 

 almost confined to, those territories of the Greater Britain which 

 lie on the other side of the globe. 



Many years ago the late Mr. Leonard Horner communicated 

 to the .Society the results of a series of borings which he had 

 caused to be made in the upper part of the delta of the Nile, 

 w iih a view' of ascertaining the antiquity of the civilisation of 

 Egypt. Since that time Figari Bey, an Italian geologist in the 

 service of the Egyptian Government, made and published the 

 results of a large series of borings effected in different parts of 

 the delta, but his work is hardly on a level with the requirements 

 of modern science. 



It has been thought advisable therefore to take advantage o 



