TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION D. — PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 395 



Section D.— ZOOLOGY. 



President of the Section. — Professor D'Arcy W. Thompson, C.B. 



THURSDAY, AUGUST 31. 

 The President delivered the following Address :— 



Magnolia Natures ; or, The Greater Problems of Biology. 



The science of Zoology, all the more the incorporate science of Biology, is no 

 simple affair, and from its earliest beginnings it has been a great and complex 

 and many-sided thing. We can scarce get a broader view of it than from 

 Aristotle, for no man has ever looked upon our science with a more far-seeing 

 and comprehending eye. Aristotle was all things that we mean by ' naturalist ' 

 or 'biologist.' He was a student of the ways and doings of beast and bird and 

 creeping thing ; he was morphologist and embryologist ; he had the keenest insight 

 into physiological problems, though lacking that knowledge of the physical 

 sciences without which physiology can go but a little way : he was the first and 

 is the greatest of psychologists ; and in the light of his genius biology merged 

 in a great philosophy. 



I do not for a moment suppose that the vast multitude of facts which 

 Aristotle records were all, or even mostly, the fruit of his own immediate and 

 independent observation. Before him were the Hippocratic and other schools of 

 physicians and anatomists. Before him there were nameless and forgotten Fabres, 

 Itoesels, Reaumurs, and Hubers, who observed the habits, the diet, and the 

 habitations of the sand- wasp or the mason-bee; who traced out the little lives, 

 and discerned the vocal organs, of grasshopper and cicada ; and who, together 

 with generations of bee-keeping peasants, gathered up the lore and wisdom of 

 the bee. There were fishermen skilled in all the cunning of their craft, who 

 discussed the wanderings of tunny and mackerel, sword-fish or anchovy; who 

 argued over the ages, the breeding-places and the food of this fish or that ; who 

 knew two thousand years before Johannes Miiller how the smooth dogfish breeds ; 

 who saw how the male pipe-fish carries ite young before Cavolini ; and who had 

 found the nest of the nest-building rock-fishes before Gerbe re-discovered it 

 almost in our own day. There were curious students of the cuttle-fish (I some- 

 times imagine they may have been priests of that sea-born goddess to whom the 

 creatures were sacred) who had diagnosed the species, recorded the habits, and 

 dissected the anatomy of the group, even to the discovery of that strange 

 hectocotylus arm that baffled Delia Chiaje, Cuvier, and Koelliker, and that 

 Verany and Heinrich Miiller re-explained. 



All this varied learning Aristotle gathered up and wove into his great web. 

 But every here and there, in words that are unmistakably the master's own, 

 we hear him speak of what are still the great problems and even the hidden 

 mysteries of our science; of such things as the nature of variation, of the struggle 

 for existence, of specific and generic differentiation of form, of the origin of 

 the tissues, the problems of heredity, the mystery of sex, of the phenomena of 



