584 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION D, 



This enterprise and tbe metliods to tp employed formed the subject of his 

 address to this Section in 1898, at Bristol: and in 1901, assisted by the high 

 mathematical ability of Professor Karl Pearson, and in consultation with Mr. 

 Francis Galton, he issued the first number of ' Biometrika : a Journal for the 

 Statistical Study of Biological Problems.' 



It can hardly be doubted that these and similar methods, if properly applied, 

 will render important service in the elucidation of the problems in which we are 

 all, botanists and zoologists alike, interested ; though I may confess, for my own 

 part, that those who prophesy from the biometric side of the church use a tongue 

 which is to me unfamiliar, and that, to my loss, I often go away miedified. 



It may appear presumptuous in one who tlius confesses his inability to grapple 

 with the mathematical intricacies involved in the application of this method if 

 he attempts to offer anything in the nature of advice to those who use it. 

 Nevertheless I do venture — it may be in the ' insolence of office ' — to urge that 

 the old adage should be borne in mind recommending that before beginning 

 culinary operations it is advisable first to catch your hare — in other words, to 

 make sure that the problem you seek to elucidate is sound from the standpoint of 

 biology before brhiging a formidable mathematical apparatus into action for its 

 investigation. 



Apart, however, from any misgivings on the propriety of the occasions on 

 which this weapon has been used, there can be no question that, properly applied, 

 the biometric method is a potent addition to the biological armoury, and in the 

 victories that it achieves Weldon will be remembered as the leader of those who 

 foresaw its usefulness and forged it. 



Not the least memorable of the lessons he has left us, is the eager and 

 strenuous manner in which he did the work, in many fields of activity, which his 

 hand found to do. And while we thus deplore his loss on our own account, as 

 biologists and as friends, our respectful sympathy goes out, I am sure, towards 

 the home where his endeavours found such skilled and devoted assistance. 



Two reports of the Evolution Committee of the Royal Society have been 

 published since Mr. Bateson's presidential address on Mendelism, or, as we are now 

 to say. Genetics, two years ago. The coincidence of our meeting with that of the 

 Hybridisation Conference in London, together, as I understand, with the fall of 

 the pea-harvest, wiU prevent the attendance at Section D of some of the chief 

 workers, though two papers on these lines have been promised us, and some aspects 

 of the matter will, I believe, receive attention at the joint meeting which we hold 

 with the botanists, in which several of the prominent foreign workers at Genetics 

 are expected to take part. 



The subject to which I wish to invite your attention is the life-history of a 

 group of lowly organisms, the Foraminifera, which belong to a division of the 

 animal kingdom standing apart from all others in the simplicity of the organisa- 

 tion of its members, the Protozoa. 



For the last seventy or eighty years the attention of zoologists has been increas- 

 ingly given to the Protozoa, not only from the interest arising from the particular 

 study of its members, but because, forming as they do a group apart from other 

 animals, and from most plants, they aflbrd a point of view from which to judge of 

 the results on fundamental questions of biology obtained in these more highly 

 developed organisms. 



The problems of the relations between protoplasm and nucleus, the significance 

 of the karyokinetic figures and of chromosomes, the phenomena of fertilisation and 

 the diflferentiation of sex, are all seen more clearly in the light of the results 

 obtained from the Protozoa. 



Apart from their interest from this wider standpoint the study of the Protozoa 

 has, as I need hardly remind you, received a great impulse of late years from the 

 discovery that, like the bacteria and their allies, whose action in this respect has 

 been longer recognised, many of them are, when they gain a footing in the body, 

 the cause of disease in man and other animals. An essential step in counteracting 



