Notes and Comments. 351 
AN INNOVATION. 
This year the various presidential addresses were ready for 
sale to the members as soon as they were delivered. These were 
bound in cloth covers of the familiar yellow-brown of the Annual 
Reports.. The increased price was gladly paid. Seeing that 
the addresses and the various abstracts of papers, etc., can now 
be purchased during the meeting, and some in cloth, it seems 
incredible that the same material should take nearly a year to 
be indexed and issued as the Report of the Association. As it 
is each member can practically make up the report, for two or 
three shillings, at the meeting. 
NEXT YEAR’S PRESIDENT OF THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 
Professor William Bateson, M.A., F.R.S., who is to be 
next year’s President, is a native of Whitby, and is a son of 
the Rev. Dr. W. H. Bateson, formerly Master of St. John’s 
College, Cambridge. ‘He was educated at Rugby School and 
St. John’s College, of which he is Honorary Fellow. He was 
for a year at Yale University as Silliman Lecturer, and in 
1g08 became the first occupant of the Chair of Biology at 
Cambridge. Three years ago he received the honorary degree 
of D.Sc. at the University of Sheffield, and it was then truly 
said of him that he might almost be called the founder of an 
entirely new school of biological research. He was the first 
scientist to make a serious attempt to. show the real bearing 
of the principle of discontinuity in variation upon the problem 
of evolution; and he was the first Englishman to recognize 
the true import of the almost forgotten theory of heredity 
that was put forward a generation ago by Mendel. Mr. 
Bateson and his coadjutors have succeeded in accumulating 
a mass of experimental evidence of the truth of Mendel’s Law, 
and have thereby probably placed us on the threshold of a 
new epoch in our knowledge of organic evolution.’ 
A NEW FLORA OF YORKSHIRE. 
We are pleased to announce the appearance shortly of a 
new Flora of Yorkshire, by Mr. F. Arnold Lees, M.R.C.S. 
It will be ‘on the lines of the Botanical Survey, using the 
three variously up-to-date Floras (Baker’s, Lees’s, and 
Robinson’s) as a foundation, a worthier format, and a much 
wider dissemination than would otherwise be possible. Its 
subject—essentially an analysis of the wild vegetation of 
England’s largest and most vari-surface county—is one that 
has bearings upon, and is applicable in its factual incidences to, 
many of the still larger island areas of the Temperate Zones. 
No source of science delving into facts of the past has 
been neglected. The question of “ fossil’’ seeds in earthy 
deposits, ancient or more recent, as well as sea-bed dredgings, 
etc., etc., which might throw light upon the origins, and 
Naturalist, 
