TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION D. 699 



recalls to us that our subject has undergone great and striking developments in the 

 forty-four years that have elapsed. Zoology was still p re-Darwinian (though 

 Charles Darwin was then in the thick of his epoch-making work — both what he 

 calls his 'plain barnacle work' and his * theoretic species work').' Although the 

 cell-theory had been launched a decade before, zoologists were not yet greatly 

 concerned with those minute structural details which have since built up the 

 .science of Histology. The heroes of our science were then chiefly those glorious 

 tield naturalists, observers, and systematists who founded and established on a firm 

 basis British Marine Zoology. Edward Forbes, Joshua Alder, Albany Hancock 

 were then in active work. George Johnston was at his zoopliytes, Bowerbank at 

 sponges, Busk at polyzoa. Forbes' short brilliant career was nearly run. He 

 probably did more than any of his contemporaries to advance marine zoology. In 

 the previous year, at the Edinburgh meeting of the Association, he and his friend 

 McAndrew, had read their classic reports,- ' On the Investigation of British 

 Marine Zoology by means of the Dredge,' and ' On South European Marine Inverte- 

 brata,' wliich mark the high water level reached at that date, and for some time 

 afterwards, in the exploration of our coasts and the explanation of the distribution 

 of our marine animals. At the Belfast meeting, which followed Ipswich, Forbes 

 exhibited his great map of the distribution of marine life in * Homoiozoic Belts.' In 

 November, 1854, he was dead, six months after his appointment to the goal of his 

 ambition, the professorship at Edinburgh, where, had he lived, there can be no 

 doubt he would, with his brilliant ability and unifjue personality, have founded a 

 great school of Marine Zoology. 



To return to the early fifties, Huxley — whose recent loss to science, to philosophy, 

 to culture, we, in common with the civilised world, now deplore — at that time just 

 returned from the memorable voyage of the ' Rattlesnake,' was opening out his 

 newly acquired treasures of comparative anatomy with papers on Siphonophora 

 and on Sagitta, and one on the structure of Ascidians,in which he urged — fourteen 

 years before Kowalevsky established it on embryological evidence in 1866 — that 

 their relations were with Ampliioxus, as we now believe, rather than with the 

 Polyzoa or the Lamellibranchiata, as had formerly been supposed. Bates was then 

 on the -Vmazons, Wallace was just going out to the Malay Archipelago, Wyville 

 Thomson, Hincks, and Carpenter, the successors of Forbes, Johnston, and Alder, 

 were beginning their life-work. Abroad that great teacher and investigator, 

 Johannes Miiller, was training amongst his pupils the most eminent zoologists, 

 anatomists, and physiologists of the succeeding quarter century. In this country, 

 as we have seen, Huxley was just beginning to publish that splendid series of 

 reseirches into the structure of nearly all groups in the animal kingdom, to which 

 comparative anatomy owes so much. 



In fact, the few years before and after the last Ipswich meeting witnessed the 

 activity of some of the greatest of our British zoologists — the time was pregnant 

 with work which has since advanced, and in some respects revolutionised our 

 subject. It was then still usual for the naturalist to have a competent knowledge 

 of the whole range of the natural sciences. Edward Forbes, for example, was a 

 botanist and a geologist, as well as a zoologist. He occupied the chair of Botany 

 at King's College, London, and the presidential chair of the Geological Section of 

 the British Association at Liverpool in 1854:. That excessive specialisation, from 

 which most of us suffer in the present day, had not yet arisen ; and i7i the compre- 

 hensive, but perhaps not very detailed, survey of his subject taken by one of the 

 field naturalists of that time, we find the beginnings of different lines of work, 

 which have since developed into some half-dozen distinct departments of zoology, 

 are now often studied independently, and are in some real danger of losing touch 

 with one another (see diagram). 



The splendid anatomical and •' morphological ' researches of Huxley and 

 Johannes Miiller have been continued by the more minute histological or cellular 

 work rendered possible by improvements of the microtome and the microscope, 



' See Life ana Letters, vol. i. p. 380. 



- British Association Report for 1850, p. 192 — ct se^- 



