234 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



argument here,, for it was submitted to the Section at Southampton. It 

 may be remarked that this is in direct opposition to the doctrine which 

 Weismaun laid down with special reference to the animal kingdom. But 

 what may be applicable for one kingdom of living things does not neces- 

 sarily apply for the other. The evolution of animals and plants has. 

 certainly been homoplastic in all its later stages. Our minds should be 

 perfectly free to follow the facts of our own science to their legitimate 

 conclusions. These indicate to me that heritable variations in plants 

 have been promoted or actually determined in their direction, or their 

 number, or their quality, in some way by external conditions. But these- 

 need not necessarily have worked within restricted time-limits of present 

 experiment ; for the wide latitude of geological time has been available- 

 for evolution to proceed. Hence negative results of the experiments of 

 a few years need not be held as overruling the conclusions drawn from 

 comparison of nearly allied forms.' 



Before we leave this historical aspect of evolution a moral may b& 

 drawn from the lives of its four protagonists of 1860. Darwin, Wallace,. 

 Hooker, and Huxley were all equipped for the battle from the armoury 

 of personal experience in the great world. The theory of evolution was 

 born and bred of foreign travel, and upon foreign travel quite as much as. 

 upon quiet work at home its future still depends. We should not for a 

 moment minimise the great developments of laboratory study and of 

 breeding experiment in recent years that bear upon its progress. But it 

 is not thence alone that the fullest achievement can be anticipated. The 

 cytologist and the breeder, just as much as the abstract theorist, should 

 know Nature face to face, not merely through a glass darkly. To those- 

 who believe in the close relation between environment and variation, 

 which is to me the very core of evolution, this seems essential to any well- 

 balanced view. The open forest, the sea-coast, steppe, and mountain-side 

 should be regarded as the natural complement to the laboratory and 

 the breeding-station. No one, morphologist or physiologist, should hold 

 himself equipped for research or fully qualified to teach unless he have at 

 least some experience of travel through wild Nature. This can best be 

 acquired in the tropics. But what do we find ? 



In 1886 a committee of this Association was appointed to assist the 

 visits of botanists to Ceylon for study. Several well-known botanists 

 availed themselves of its aid ; but after a few years the scheme flickered 

 out through inanition. In 1909 I visited the Cinchona Station in Jamaica, 

 and again a scheme for continued use of the station by British botanists 

 was initiated ; but it has since died out for want of consistent support. 

 Why did these efforts fail ? We may set these failures down to under- 

 valuation of the importance of foreign, and particularly of tropical, study ; 

 and the lack of full perception that open Nature is the greatest laboratory 

 of all. Our future Botany seems in danger of becoming myopic by reason 

 of study being concentrated at too short focus. To correct this, young 

 aspirants should travel early, as free-lances, hazarding the fortune of the 

 wild, as Darwin and his fellows did. 



1 Gates, in his volume on the ' Mutation Factor in Evolution ' (1915), draws to 

 a close ■« ith -words that may well be quoted here. ' It would appear (he says) that 

 something within the organism is responsible for such unswerving progress in a given 

 direction as appears to be repeated over and over again in the palaeontological record.' 



