SECTION D.— ZOOLOGY. 



THE PIONEER WORK OF THE 

 SYSTEMATIST 



ADDRESS BY 



THE RIGHT HON. LORD ROTHSCHILD, Ph.D., F.R.S., 



PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 



I FEEL greatly honoured by the position I occupy at this year's meeting 

 of the British Association, and am truly grateful to the Council for 

 having chosen me as President of Section D. As the type of work 

 pursued by us at Tring is well known to the Council, I may assume 

 that I am not expected to speak from this chair on the advances made 

 in Zoology during recent years, of which many of you are much better 

 qualified to give a survey than I, but to set before this meeting some 

 biological problems as seen by a systematist who has devoted much the 

 greater part of his life to the study of species and what some among you 

 may be inclined to call ' that sort of thing.' Biology is such a vast and 

 many-sided subject that there are naturally many directions of approach, 

 and if one branch of research works in one direction and another branch 

 from the opposite side, it has for the uninitiated often the appearance as 

 if there were antagonism between such opposite lines of attack, while in 

 reality all the different lines support each other in their quest after a 

 solution of the secrets of Nature. Biologists are in the happy position 

 that, whatever theories they may favour at one time or the other, they 

 have nothing preconceived to defend at all costs ; for they all strive 

 towards the same object : the advance of natural knowledge, wherever 

 that may lead. 



The inquiry into the secrets of organic Nature may be divided into 

 three categories of questions : (i) what organisms creative forces have 

 produced on Earth ; (2) how they have produced them ; and (3) what is 

 the nature of the creative forces. The animal world, which appears 

 almost infinite in the number of different forms, their diversity of food, 

 behaviour, fertility and details of their life-histories, presents a picture of 

 life confusing in its endless variety. Yet there is orderliness underlying 

 this seeming confusion, and it is the first task of the systematist to discover 

 this orderliness and sort the multitude of organisms accordingly. It was 

 at the time of Linnaeus a comparatively simple achievement for one man 

 to have enumerated all the animals then known, his Systema Nattace of 

 1758 containing altogether fewer than 4,300 species. That task is in 

 our days a hundred times more difficult, not only on account of the vast 

 number of species which have poured into collections, are still pouring in 

 and will continue to do so for a long time, but especially because research 



