ADDBESS 



BY 



PEOFESSOE G. J. ALLMAN, 



M.D., LL.D., F.R.SS. L. and B., M.R.I.A., Pres. L.S., 

 PRESIDENT. 



It is no easy thing to find material suited to an occasion like the present. 

 For on the one hand there is risk that a presidential address may be too 

 special for an audience necessarily large and general, while on the other 

 hand it may treat too much of generalities to take hold of the sympathies 

 and command the attention of the hearers. 



It may be supposed that my subject should have been suggested by 

 the great manufacturing industries of the town which has brought us to- 

 gether ; but I felt convinced that a worker in only the biological sciences 

 could not do justice to the workers in so very different a field. 



I am not therefore going to discourse to you of any of those great 

 industries which make civilised society what it is, — of those practical 

 applications of scientific truth which within the last half-century have 

 become developed with such marvellous rapidity, and which have already 

 become interwoven with our everyday life, as the warp of the weaver is 

 interwoven with the woof. Such subjects must be left to other occupiers 

 of this chair, from whom they may receive that justice which I could not 

 pretend to give them ; and I believe I shall act most wisely by keeping to 

 a field with which my own studies have been more directly connected. 



I know that there are many here present from whom I have no right 

 to expect that previous knowledge which would justify me in dispensing 

 with such an amount of elementary treatment as can alone bring my 

 subject intelligibly before them, and my fellow-members of the British 

 Association who have the advantage of being no novices in that depart- 

 ment of biology with which I propose to occupy you, will pardon me if I 

 address myself mainly to those for whom the field of research on which 

 we are about to enter has now been opened for the first time. 



I have chosen, then, as the matter of my address to you to-night, a 

 subject in whose study there has during the last few years prevailed an 

 unwonted amount of activity, resulting in the discovery of many remark- 

 1879. b 



