TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION D. 683 



is some kind of index-making. But we should recognise tliat comparatively 

 modern adaptations may be of vital importance to the species, and particularly 

 luminous to the student because at times they show us nature at work. 



I am accustomed to refer such adaptations to the process of Natural Selection, 

 though if any one claimed to explain them by another process, I should, for present 

 purposes, cheerfully adopt a more neutral phrase. There are, I believe, no limits to be 

 assigned to the action of Natural Selection upon living plants and animals. 

 Natural Selection can act upon the egg, the embryo, the larva, and the resting 

 pupa, as well as upon the adult capable of propagation. It can even influence the 

 race through individuals which are not in the line of descent at all, such as adults 

 past bearing or the neuters of a colony. The distinction between historical and 

 adaptive, palingenetic and coenogenetic, is relative only, a difi'erence not of kind 

 but of degree. All features are adaptive, but they may be adapted to a past rather 

 than to a present state of things ; they may be ancient, and deeply impressed upon 

 the organisation of the class. 



In Biology facts without thought are nothing; thought without facts is 

 nothing ; thought applied to concrete facts may come to something when time has 

 sorted out what is true from what is merely plausible. The Reports of this 

 Association will be preserved here and there in great libraries till a date when the 

 biological speculations of 1897 are as extinct as the Ptolemaic Astronomy. If 

 many years hence some one should turn over the old volumes, and light upon this 

 long-forgotten address, I hope that he will give me credit for having seen what was 

 coming. Except where the urgent need of brevity has for the moment been too 

 much for scientific caution, I trust that he will find nothing that is dogmatic or 

 over-confident in my remarks. 



The following Reports and Papers were read : — 



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



See Reports, p. 353. 



2 Report on Investigations made at the Laboratory of the Marine 

 Biological Station, Plymouth. — See Reports, p. 370. 



3. On the Naples Ifarine Station and its Worlc. 

 By Dr. Anton Dohrn. 



4. On a proposed Lacustrine Biological Station for Canada. 

 By Professor R. Ramsay Wright. 



5. Orirjin of Vertebrata. By Professor C. S. Minot. 



