BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE. 
NORWICH, 1935. 
THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 
FORM, DRIFT, AND RHYTHM OF THE 
CONTINENTS 
BY 
ProressorR W. W. WATTS, LL.D., Sc.D., F.R.S., 
PRESIDENT OF THE ASSOCIATION. 
IT is now sixty-seven years since the British Association enjoyed the 
hospitality of the city of Norwich, a privilege which is being renewed 
to-day under the most happy auspices. 
At that meeting we find the scientific community was particularly 
interested in underground temperatures and tidal phenomena, in 
the application of the spectroscope to celestial objects, and in the 
discovery of the oldest Cambrian fossils and the earliest fossil 
mammals then known. Many papers were read on local natural 
history, including those on Norfolk farming and the drainage of the 
County and of the Fens. 
In his address at the meeting the President, Sir Joseph D. Hooker, 
made special reference to the work of Charles Darwin : not to the 
Origin of Species which had been acrimoniously discussed by the 
Association on previous occasions, and notably at Oxford in 1860, 
but to some of the work that followed. 
It should be remembered that Hooker was one of the three 
scientific men, representing botany, zoology and geology, whom 
Darwin had selected as judges with whose opinion on the soundness 
of his theory of the origin of species he would be content. The 
others were Huxley and Lyell; and of the three Lyell was the 
hardest to convince, chiefly because the record of life in the past 
then furnished by the rocks was manifestly so incomplete and un- 
satisfactory that its evidence was insufficient to warrant a definite 
verdict. 
Lyell had set out to ‘treat of such features of the economy of 
existing nature, animate and inanimate, as are illustrative of geology,’ 
B 
