TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION D. 667 



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Sectiox D.— biology. 



President of the Section.— Professor I. Batlet Balfottb, 

 M.A., F.R.S., F.R.S.E. 



THURSDAY, AUGUST 9. 



[For the President's Address see below.] 



The following Reports were read : — 



1. Report on Investigations made at the Zoological Station, Naples. 



See Reports, p. 335. 



2. Report on Investigations made at the Laboratory of the Marine 

 Biological Association, Plymouth. — See Reports, p. 345. 



3. Report on the Zoology of the Sandwich Islands. — See Reports, p. 343. 



4. Report on the Fauna and Flora of the West India Islands. 

 See Reports, p. 344. 



5. Report on the Index Generum et SjMcierum. — See Reports, p. 347. 



The President delivered the following Address : — 



The prospect of visiting Oxford to-day has, I am sure, been to all of us a pleasant 

 one, and we who are specially interested in biology have looked forward to our 

 meeting at this time with the distinguished members of the Oxford Biological 

 School. But as we gather here there will, I think, be present to the minds of all 

 of us a thought of one member of that school, whom we had hoped to meet, who 

 is recently gone from it in the prime of his intellectual life. By the death of 

 George John Romanes biological science is bereft of one of its foremost expositors, 

 Oxford is deprived too soon of one whose mental power was yet in its zenith, and 

 each one of us who knew him cannot but feel a deep sense of personal loss ; and 

 we shall in our meeting here sadly miss the man brimming with a geniality which 

 robbed differences of their difficulty and charmed away bitterness from those con- 

 troversies in which he revelled. This is not the occasion upon which to dwell on 

 his character, his merits, or his work. We must all, I think, have appreciated the 

 graceful accuracy with which these were sketched in the pages of ' Nature ' by one 

 of his colleagues ; but under the shadow, as we are here, of his recent death, I 



