4 PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 
Astronomical observation ig now organised on an international scale, 
and of this great scheme Gill was the heart and soul. His labours have 
ensured a base from which others will proceed to discovery otherwise 
impossible. His name will be long remembered with veneration and 
gratitude. 
As the subject of the Addresses which I am to deliver here and 
in Sydney I take Heredity. I shall attempt to give the essence 
of the discoveries made by Mendelian or analytical methods of 
study, and I shall ask you to contemplate the deductions which these 
physiological facts suggest in application both to evolutionary theory at 
large and to the special case of the natural history of human society. 
Recognition of the significance of heredity is modern. The term 
itself in its scientific sense is no older than Herbert Spencer. Animals 
and plants are formed as pieces of living material split from the body 
of the parent organisms. Their powers and faculties are fixed in their 
physiological origin. They are the consequence of a genetic process, 
and yet it is only lately that this genetic process has become the subject 
of systematic research and experiment. The curiosity of naturalists 
has of course always been attracted to such problems; but that accurate 
knowledge of genetics is of paramount importance in any attempt to 
understand the nature of living things has only been realised quite 
lately even by naturalists, and with casual exceptions the laity still 
know nothing of the matter. Historians debate the past of the human 
species, and statesmen order its present or profess to guide its future 
as if the animal Man, the unit of their calculations, with his vast 
diversity of powers, were a homogeneous material, which can be 
multiplied like shot. 
The reason for this neglect lies in ignorance and misunderstanding 
of the nature of Variation; for not until the fact of congenital diversity 
is grasped, with all that it imports, does knowledge of the system of 
hereditary transmission stand out as a primary necessity in the con- 
struction of any theory of Evolution, or any scheme of human polity. 
The first full perception of the significance of variation we owe to 
Darwin. The present generation of evolutionists realises perhaps more 
. fully than did the scientific world in the last century that the theory of 
Evolution had occupied the thoughts of many and found acceptance 
with not a few before ever the ‘ Origin’ appeared. We have come also 
to the conviction that the principle of Natural Selection cannot have 
been the chief factor in delimiting the species of animals and plants, 
such as we now with fuller knowledge see them actually to be. We 
are even more sceptical as to the validity of that appeal to changes in 
the conditions of life as direct causes of modification, upon which 
latterly at all events Darwin laid much emphasis. But that he was the 
