TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION D. 677 



importance, liowever well equipped tbey were witli latoratcrics and appliances 

 and endowments for research. 



It will be of very little profit to tbis country to endow munificently the 

 technical institutions and those branches of science to which the adjective 

 ' applied ' is given, to build British ' Charlottenburgs,' and to attract by handsome 

 salaries the most distinguished professors to the study of the application of 

 science, if at the same time we starve and allow to sink into insignificance the 

 fundamental sciences upon which the whole superstructure rests. It does not 

 need a prophet to foretell that a great disaster will occur if we add story to story 

 of our house of education without widening and broadening the basis upon which 

 it rests. 



Many of us, I am afraid, are too much inclined to believe that the intellectual 

 portion of the community has at last awakened to the importance of the work in 

 the fields of pure science, that the old prejudice against us who indulge what is 

 called our harmless curiosity is dying out, and that our science is bound to receive 

 a fair share of encouragement and attention in the progress of the modern develop- 

 ments of science and learning. 



The distinction that is drawn between pure and applied science is, however, in 

 danger of being broadened and deepened rather than diminished by the recent 

 activity in the foundation of schools and colleges for technical instruction. There 

 are, it is true, several eminent and distinguished persons who recognise the 

 danger and do their best to avoid it, but this fact is not in itself sufficient to 

 justify us in any rela.xation of our efforts on behalf of the maintenance and develop- 

 ment of those branches of the sciences which are usually supposed to have no 

 direct or technical application. 



In the wide field of zoological research there are many subjects now being 

 investigated and discussed which, at present, seem to us to have but a remote 

 bearing upon any practical problem of industry or medicine. Of all these subjects 

 there are two which have excited during the past ten years extraordinary interest, 

 and are from many points of view subjects of greatest possible importance. I refer 

 to the subject of the natural variations of animals and plants, and the problem of 

 the hereditary transmission of characters from generation to generation. 



At present there appears to be some doubt whether the workers in these sub- 

 jects are really agreed as to the general propositions of the problems, the defini- 

 tions of the terms employed, and the standard of proof that is requisite in each 

 step of progress. It is true that in most, if not in all, biological problems we are at 

 the disadvantage of being unable to define or measure anything with the same 

 mathematical accuracy that our friends, the chemists and physicists, are accus- 

 tomed to. AV^e cannot say for example that the chela of a particular species of 

 crab is so many millimetres in length, in the manner the chemist determines the 

 atomic weight of a new metal, as tlie length of the chela is found to vary within 

 a certain range in all species that have been investigated ; nor can we define such 

 common expressions as a species, a variation, or even a cell with the same con- 

 ciseness as a physicist defines the ohm, the volt, specific gravity, or the mechanical 

 equivalent of heat. As a consequence it is not surprising that when our problems 

 have been studied and a solution reached the resultant 'laws' exhibit so many 

 exceptions that they are really not worthy to be called ' laws ' at all. We may 

 see the truth, but we see it as through a glass, darkly. 



There is perhaps no word in the whole of our vocabular}' w-hich is used in so 

 manj' different senses as the word ' variation,' and yet when it is used an attempt is 

 only rarely made to define the sense in which it is employed. 



When (ve study the adult progeny of a single pair of parents we notice that 

 they diflfer from one another as regards any one particular chafacter within a 

 certain range. Thus the eight children of a single pair of human parents may 

 vary in weight from, say, 130 lbs. to 200 lbs., and we may find that the average 

 weight of the eight children is approximately the same as the average weight of 

 the two parents. If parents and children were all of exactly the same weight — 

 an impossible supposition — it would be said that they exhibited no variation in 

 this lespect, but, as they always do vary in weight, it is said that they exhibit 



