TBAMSACTIONS OF SECTION D. — PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS, 583 



Section D.— ZOOLOGY. 

 President of the Section.— J. J. Lister, M.A., F.R.S., F.Z.S. 



THURSDA Y, A UGUST 2. 

 TLe Pre.sident delivered tlie following Address : — 



The Life-History of the Foraminifera. 



In the year 188] the British Association, having completed the fiftieth year of 

 :its existence, met again in the city of York, where its first meeting had heen held. 

 iBy way of marking the completion of its Brst half-century, and also to do honour 

 to the city which had welcomed its initiatory gathering, it was arranged that the 

 president of each section of the Association should he selected from among the 

 past presidents of the whole. At that time botanists and zoologists were not so 

 far specialised into distinct groups as, for better or worse, they have since become, 

 and were still, at any rate for the purposes of the British Association meetings, 

 able to share their deliberations. Section D included, besides that of zoology and 

 botany, the departments of anthropology and of anatomy and physiology, though 

 the two latter had each its own vice-president. 



The naturalist who was selected to preside in 1881 over the whole section was 

 the veteran zoologist, Sir Richard Owen. By that time all or nearly all the 

 434 scientific memoirs which stand to his name in the Royal Society's Catalogue 

 had been written. Those dealing with comparative anatomy and palaeontology, 

 and they are by far the greater part, constitute, to quote the words of Huxley, 

 ' a splendid record ; enough and more than enough to justify the high place 

 in the scientific world which Owen so long occupied. If I "mistake not, the 

 historian of comparative anatomy and of palaeontology will always assign to 

 Owen a place next to and hardly lower than that of Cuvier, who was practically 

 the creator of those sciences in their modern shape.' But Owen's presidential 

 address dealt not with the anatomy or relationships of living or extinct animals, 

 nor with any of those views on ' transcendental anatomy 'which have met with less 

 acceptance. The subject selected was the great Natiu-al History Museum at 

 South Kensington, to the planning and establishment of which the energy of his 

 later years was largely directed. 



In considering the previous occupants of the chair which I have the honour to 

 hold at this seventy. sixth meeting, I cannot refrain from expressing my sense of the 

 loss which not only his friends, but zoology at large, have sustained in the death, 

 last Easter, of Professor Weldon, the Linacre Professor of Comparative Anatomy 

 at Oxford. 



Trained in the pathways of morphology under Balfour at Cambridge, 

 Weldon's energies were, in the later years of his life, devoted to the endeavour to 

 obtain determinations, by means of exact measurements, of the degree of variation 

 from the normal type to which given populations are subject, and, so doing, to 

 find jin approximately exact measure of the action of natural selection. 



