678 KEPOET— 1887. 



viewing all nature witli distorted vision, seeing in fact ' men as trees walking-.' 

 K as a student he shall have been nurtured wholly on the anatomy of the sole, all 

 objects will be viewed from the standpoint of that one-sided fish. If the cockroach 

 has engrossed his youthful studies, all nature will swarm with Pei'iplaneta 

 orientalis. 



We have to guard against the starting of st>ide7it-,ipecialists. They must begin 

 by being ' general practitioners ' if they are ever to do any good in the world of 

 science, and after serving their time in a museum or elsewhere then by all means 

 let each follow his own ' bent ' and devote himself to some particular group, as did 

 Davidson to the Brachiopoda, to the exclusion of all else. 



It is the absence of 'all-roundness' which has retarded more than any other 

 thing the constant interchange of ideas between zoologists, botanists, and 

 palaeontologists, without which science languishes. Biologists as a body do not 

 care to look at or study fossils ; they see neither form nor beauty in the petrified 

 fragments of a plant or animal such as would induce them to study these more 

 closely, and they turn to the exquisitely perfect specimens of recent objects in 

 their cabinets with a sigh of relief But Nemesis is at hand, created by our 

 modern system of extreme Ijiological training. The student of to-day is averse to 

 the systematic work of both zoology and palfeontology in our museums, and 

 technically inclined craves for nothing so much as to be allowed to imbed some 

 interesting embryo in paraflin and cut it into 10,000 slices. 



As a consequence our museums will sufl'er unless we can revive amongst our 

 students a taste for and a love of general natural history; such, we mean, as the 

 tuste for nature which excited the enthusiasm of Charles Kingslf>y and stimulated 

 the zeal of Charles Darwin. We cannot all sail round the world as did Banks and 

 Solander, Darwin, Huxley, Hooker, Wy ville Thomson, IMoseley, and so many other 

 naturalists, though the mere act of travelling has now become so ridiculously easy 

 that our own Association awoke (?ne morning in Montreal, and may for aught we 

 know find itself some day in Sydney or Jlelbourne ! But we can fully appreciate 

 iS^ature in a dredging expedition or feel her influence on a moor or mountain, in a 

 quarry or down a mine. 



What we want for our students in these high-pressure days are less frequent 

 attendance in the examination room and a more frequent examination of Nature in 

 the field. Our professors must take their men more often afield, and show them 

 how to collect specimens and familiarise them with the aspects of natural objects 

 as seen ivithout microscopes, and they will return to their studies with far better 

 and keener eyesight after their own tnacroscojnc vision has been enlarged by 

 contact with Nature. 



Whoever then takes up the studj"^ of fossils must also be well acquainted with 

 the structure of living animals and plants ; he may also be expected to go on adding 

 to his store of biological knowledge — but as some division of labour is absolutely 

 essential, the man who pursues palieontological research must be prepared to con- 

 centrate all his energies on the elucidation of these extinct organisms, studying, but 

 not occupying himself in describing, recent forms. 



In order, however, to work satisfiictorily at any particular group of extinct 

 ■organisms, his eyes and his undei-standing must go through a long and careful 

 training before he will be able to interpret correctly the appearances presented by 

 the specimen before him, and to avoid the fallacies by which he is liable to be 

 misled arising out of the necessarily imperfect materials and their diflerent modes 

 of preservation in the matrix. 



He must learn to distinguish between a suture and a fracture, and to know when 

 a specimen has been distorted by cleavage or other mechanical cause, or altered by 

 mere difference of mineralisation. Such deceptive appearances have too often led 

 to the multiplication of species, and even the creation of spurious genera. 



Thus occupied in the investigation of ancient life forms, he will in truth be only 

 wiiting the first chapters on the botany or the zoology of the earth, and, whilst his 

 I'.irefully obtained results are of the greatest importance to the speculations and 

 conclusions of the geologist, they are equally essential to and a part of biological 

 science. 



