SECTION K.— BOTANY. 



1860-1894-1926. 



ADDRESS BY 



PROFESSOR F. 0. BOWER, Sc.D., D.Sc, LL.D., F.R.S., 



PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 



' The future of Biology lies not in generalisation but in closer and 

 closer analysis.' — Bateson (Birkbeck Lecture, 1924). 



Death sudden and wholly unforeseen has stepped between this Section 

 and the President of its choice. Professor Bateson had presided over the 

 whole Association at its meeting in Australia, and partly on that account 

 he had been specially selected for the chair of this Section in Oxford. 

 From him we might have expected a broad outlook upon biological 

 science. His address would have been instinct with wide experience in 

 both of the branches of living things, the interests of which interweave 

 in enthralling and often most perplexing ways. We should have heard 

 a fearless statement of his mature views. Something constructive would 

 certainly have justified the congratulations with which some of us had 

 already welcomed his nomination. A great figure has been taken from 

 the arena of biological science. A career still full of the promise of further 

 achievement has closed prematurely. 



This is not the time or the place for any comprehensive obituary of 

 Bateson ; nor would I divert your attention from those already before 

 you, written by more competent hands. I will only allude briefly to 

 four leading events in his scientific career. He felt in early life the lack of 

 facts bearing on variation, and sought to extend their area in his great work 

 ' Materials for the Study of Variation,' published in 1894. This was the 

 year when the Association last met in Oxford. I do not remember that 

 its contents came into the discussions in Section D, though the book 

 centred upon the vital question of continuity and discontinuity. The 

 second event was the publication in 1902 of ' Mendel's Principles of 

 Heredity,' in which, though essentially a controversial statement, Bateson 

 perceived latent in the rediscovered writings an expanding vista of 

 advance. ' Each conception of life (he says) in which heredity bears 

 a part must change before the coming rush of facts.' In a third stage of 

 his work Bateson expanded this theme into a fuller statement under the 

 same title, and it was published in 1909. Passing from this period of 

 high hopes to the fourth phase of 1924, we see in his Address at the Birkbeck 

 Centenary a chastened attitude. He there remarks : ' We must frankly 

 admit that modern discoveries have given little aid with the problem of 

 adaptation,' and that, much as Mendelian analysis has done, ' it has 

 not given us the origin of species.' But that analysis having ' led to 

 the discovery of transferable characters, we now know upon what to 



