2 THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 



splendid service for science, as has been so well shown in Dr. R. T. 

 Gunther's volumes.^ 



Faced by the serious duty of preparing this address, I felt that the 

 best hope of interesting you would be to choose a subject which has 

 received special attention at our meetings. I have selected the 

 progress of thought on Organic Evolution as it may be followed in 

 addresses, papers, and discussions, mainly restricting myself to the 

 series of meetings which began with the Jubilee at York in 1881, the 

 first of many that I have had the pleasure of attending. 



The British Association provides a very favourable field for the 

 discussion of many-sided subjects such as Evolution — subjects 

 which attract members from very different as well as from closely 

 related Sections. Hence a wide range of varied experience is open 

 to one who can look back over more than half a century ; and I do 

 not propose to exclude some of the humorous sayings and incidents 

 which, from time to time, have enlivened our meetings and con- 

 tributed to their success. Some of them certainly deserve to be 

 rescued from oblivion, although to perform this pious duty I must 

 risk the enmity of the Goddess of Folly, who as Erasmus tells us, 

 proclaimed : ' I hate a man who remembers what he hears.' 



The Fiftieth Anniversary at York was a memorable meeting, with 

 Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury) as President, and the Chair of 

 every Section except Economics, under Grant Duff, taken by a 

 Past-President of the Association. 



I then enjoyed to the full one of the chief benefits conferred by 

 our Association upon its younger members — the opportunity of 

 meeting older men, up to that time only known to them by the fame 

 of their discoveries. Prof. O. C. Marsh had come over from Yale, 

 his main object being to buy for his University Museum the second 

 and more perfect fossil of the wonderful ancestral bird Archaeo- 

 pteryx, with teeth and a long, lizard-like tail — clear evidence of 

 Reptilian origin. The earlier example had been bought for the 

 British Museum at a price which was said to have provided the 

 dowry for a professor's daughter, and Marsh soon realised, as he 

 told me, that the second was not for sale on any terms. ' We let 

 the other go and I believe they would kill me if this were sold ' was 

 the reply given to him by the authority in Munich. He was 

 able, however, to study the fossil, and his description and drawings 

 of the teeth, in the Geological Section, followed the only attack on 

 Evolution itself, as distinct from its causes, which I have ever 

 witnessed at any of our meetings. It was the exhibition by H. G. 

 Seeley of his reconstruction of Archaeopteryx from this fossil, 



1 Early Science in Oxford, vols. i-xi. 



