THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS , 3 



which aroused the fury of the palaeontologist, old Dr. Thomas 

 Wright of Cheltenham : ' Archaeopteryx hasn't got a head, how 

 can it possibly have teeth ? ' he growled, knowing nothing of the 

 latest find or of the fact that Sir John Evans, our President at Toronto, 

 had discovered a detached head and scattered teeth on the slab in 

 which the older specimen was embedded . In spite of Prof. Newton 's 

 positive statement and the form of the teeth, drawn by Prof. Marsh 

 at the request of the Chairman, Dr. Wright, quite unconvinced, con- 

 tinued muttering ' Archaeopteryx is a very good bird,' its virtue in 

 his opinion entirely un contaminated by any taint of Reptilian affinity. 

 Prof. Marsh also read a paper in the Zoological Section on his own 

 wonderful discoveries of toothed birds from the rocks of the western 

 United States. Richard Owen, President of the Section, was in the 

 Chair and, with the memory of old and embittered controversies in 

 his mind, the author told me that he had felt rather anxious in 

 bringing this communication forward. But in that friendly atmo- 

 sphere there was no reason for alarm. Owen welcomed the paper 

 warmly and in confirmation told us, in the most charming manner, 

 of the traces of teeth found in an embryo parrot. 



The event which stands out most clearly in my memories of the 

 Jubilee meeting is Huxley's evening lecture on ' The Rise and 

 Progress of Palaeontology ' — the science which provides an essential 

 part of the foundation on which Geographical, Geological and 

 Biological evolutionary history has been built. The insuperable 

 difficulty felt by the older naturalists was to believe that the land 

 had been for the most part deposited under the sea, and to account 

 for the presence of fossils, or as they were called, ' formed stones.' 

 The true solution, Huxley explained, was found and published in 

 1669 by Nicholas Steno, a Danish Professor of Anatomy at Florence, 

 who carefully studied certain fossils, known as ' glossopetrae,' which 

 abounded in the Tuscan rocks and were believed to be fossil 

 fig-leaves. Steno, who was not satisfied with this interpretation, 

 dissected a shark's head and showed that the * glossopetrae ' exactly 

 corresponded in every particular with the teeth — ' that in fact they 

 were shark's teeth.' The emphasis with which Huxley made this 

 statement comes back to me after the lapse of nearly sixty years. 

 From this Steno was led to conclude that they were the teeth of 

 shark-like fishes living in the Tuscan sea and later embedded, with 

 other remains, in the strata which had there accumulated. 



I have not noticed the fanciful suggestion of ' fossil fig-leaves ' in 

 any published version or account of Huxley's lecture that I have 

 seen, but he certainly told us of it and it is an interesting example of 

 the attempts made by the naturalists of the day to explain the fossils 

 embedded in rocks then believed to be of terrestrial origin. I 



