520 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION D. 
Section D.—ZOOLOGY. 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION.—WILLIAM E. Hoyzr, M.A., D.Sc. 
THURSDAY, AUGUST 1. 
The President delivered the following Address :— 
Tue impression left upon my mind by a score of Presidential Addresses to this 
Section, which it has been my privilege to hear, is that the speaker who treats of 
the subject matter of his own researches has the best prospect of making his 
remarks interesting and profitable to his audience, It is therefore in no spirit of 
egotism that I invite your attention this morning to the small and economically 
unimportant group of the Cephalopoda. 
Some of my predecessors have been men who walked, so to speak, on the 
heights; who undertook the culture, or at all events the surveillance, of large 
domains. The extensive views and broad principles which they have thus been 
able to lay before the Section have been such as at once to compel the attention 
of all who are interested in any department of biology, or indeed of any branch 
of science at all. My own case has been far different; the plot I have tried 
to cultivate has been a very small one, and I have had but little leisure to peep 
over the fence and see what my neighbours were doing. I come before you, 
therefore, as a specialist, and not only so, but as that most humble kind of 
specialist—a systematist (a ‘mere systematist ’ is, I believe, the common phrase)— 
one whose main work has been the discrimination and definition of genera and 
species. I feel that some apology is necessary in asking zoologists of all depart- 
ments to step for an hour into my particular allotment and see what has been 
going on there during the last few decades. 
Before inviting you to enter, however, I should like to plead that even the 
systematist has his uses ; for, properly considered, what is the systematic arrange- 
ment of any group of animals but the condensed formal expression of our present 
knowledge regarding its morphology, ontogeny, and phylogeny? Furthermore, 
how could the varied and complex problems of geographical distribution be attacked 
without the materials prepared by the systematist P 
Having said this much by way of apology and defence, let me invite you 
without further prelude to consider two or three questions suggested by the 
study of the Cephalopoda. 
Just half a century ago (August 1, 1857), there appeared in the ‘ Annals and 
Magazine of Natural History’ the translation of a paper by the late Professor 
Steenstrup (39) ' of Copenhagen which has ever since been regarded as marking 
an epoch in our knowledge of the Cephalopoda. The consideration of the scope 
and significance of this memoir may profitably engage our attention for a short 
time. In researches which were then comparatively recent Vérany and Vogt (42) 
and Heinrich Miiller (82) had shown that, in the genera Tremoctopus and 
Argonauta, the hectocotylus, a supposed parasitic worm which had been found 
in the mantle-cavity of the female, was in reality one of the arms of the male 
1 The figures refer to the list of references at the end of the Address. 
