354 eepobt— 1879. 



Section D.— BIOLOGY. 



President op the Section— Professor St. George Mivart, F.R.S., F.L.S., F.Z.S. 



DEPARTMENT OF ZOOLOGY AND BOTANY. 



THURSDAY, AUGUST 21, 1879. 



The President delivered the following Address : — 



In responding to the honour which the authorities of the British Association have 

 conferred in nominating me to fill this chair, I have deemed it hest not to occupy 

 your very valuable time with any matter of detail at which I may happen to have 

 worked, but rather to offer to you a few remarks on questions which seem to me 

 to have a general biological interest. 



Last year my esteemed friend, Professor Flower, called your attention to the 

 great name of Linn^tjs. I propose this year to refer to Linnaeus' illustrious 

 contemporary, Buffon — not, however, in the character of a rival of Linnasus. 

 Each was a man of genius, each did good work in his own way — work still 

 bringing forth fruit. It must be admitted, however, that they were men of 

 a very different stamp, and if it is necessary to express a relative judgment with 

 respect to them, I should myself feel inclined to say that Button's mind had the 

 greater aptitude for sagacious speculation, with an inferior power of acquiring and 

 arranging a knowledge of facts of structure. 



Various circumstances have concurred to favour our recollection of the merits 

 of the great Swede, and to obscure those of the French naturalist. The well- 

 earned fame of Linnaeus is kept ever fresh in our memories by the necessarily 

 frequent references to him in matters of nomenclature. On the other hand, not 

 only are Button's claims on our esteem in no similar way brought before us, but 

 those very speculative opinions of his, which are a merit in our eyes, have gained 

 him disfavour with our immediate predecessors, whose opinions and sentiments we 

 more or less inherit. 



No one, however, can dispute Button's title to our grateful respect on account 

 of the very powerful effect his writings had in stimulating men's love of nature, 

 an effect which I think is not sufficiently appreciated. 



It is fitting that I should call attention to his (once generally recognised) claims 

 in this respect; since my own love of natural history is probably due to the 

 circumstance that his great work was always accessible to me in my childhood, 

 and was one of the earliest books with the pictures of which I was familiar. 



Button was indeed Linnasus's contemporary, for the same year (1707) saw the 

 births of both. In 1733 he was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences, 

 and six years later was appointed superintendent of the Jardin du Roi, 1 which 



1 The Jardin du Roi was first instituted by Louis XIII. in 1628, and definitively 

 established in 1635. It cannot be affirmed that Buffon enriched the incipient museum 

 — the Cabinet du Roi — so much as might have been expected ; although the skeletons 

 which served for Daubenton's descriptions were, at least in many instances, preserved. 

 It is to Geoffroy St.-Hilaire that the magnificent museum of the Jardin des Plantes, 

 which now exists, is most indebted. 



