500 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION D. 
Section D.—ZOOLOGY. 
PRESIDENT oF THE SEcTION.—H. F. Gapow, M.A., Ph.D., F.R.S. 
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 
The President delivered the following Address :— 
“ADDRESS your audience about what you yourself happen to be most interested 
in, speak from the fullness of your heart and make a clean breast of your 
troubles.’ That seemed good advice, and I shall endeavour to follow it, taking 
for my text old and new aims and methods of morphology, with special refer- 
ence to resemblances in function and structure on the part of organs and their 
owners in the animal kingdom. First, however, allow me to tell you what has 
brought me to such a well-worn theme. Amongst the many impressions which 
it has been my good luck to gather during my travels in that enchanting country 
Mexico are the two following :— 
First, the poisonous Coral snakes, Hlaps, in their beautiful black, red, and 
yellow garb; it varies in detail in the various species of Hlaps, and this garb, 
with most of the variations too, occurs also in an astonishing number of genera 
and families of semi-poisonous and quite harmless Mexican snakes, some of 
which inhabit the same districts. A somewhat exhaustive study of these 
beauties has shown incontestably that these often astoundingly close resem- 
blances are not cases of mimicry, but due to some other co-operations. 
Secondly, in the wilds of the State of Michoacan, at two places, about 
20 and 70 miles from the Pacific Coast, I myself collected specimens of 7'yphlops 
which Dr. Boulenger without hesitation has determined as 7'yphlops braminus. 
Now, whilst this genus of wormlike, blind little snakes has a wide circum- 
tropical distribution, 7’. braminus had hitherto been known only from the 
islands and countries of the Indian Ocean basin, never from America, nor 
from any of the Pacific Islands which possess other kinds of 7'yphlops. Acci- 
dental introduction is out of the question. Although the genus is, to judge 
from its characters, an especially old one, we cannot possibly assume that the 
species braminus, if the little thing had made its way from Asia to Mexico by a 
natural mode of spreading, has remained unaltered even to the slightest detail 
since that geological epoch during which such a journey could have taken place. 
There remains the assumption that amongst the of course countless generations 
of Typhlops in Mexico some have hit off exactly the same kind of permutation 
and combination of those characters which we have hitherto considered as 
specific of braminus, just as a pack of cards may in a long series of deals be 
dealt out more than once in the same sequence. 
The two cases are impressive. They reminded me vividly that many 
examples of very discontinuous distribution—which anyone who has worked at 
zoogeography will call to mind—are exhibited by genera, families, and even 
orders, without our knowing whether the groups in which we class them are 
natural or artificial. The ultimate appeal lies with anatomy. 
