46 Possibilities of Societies.. 



any naturalist worker in Dumfries. It was in a quiet and 

 secluded garden at Orpington, in Kent, that many of his 

 most instructive studies were conducted, and so essential to 

 him were the quiet and seclusion that I remember him telling 

 me that after one day's visit to London it always took him 

 three days to settle down to work again at Orpington. 



Since the promulgation of natural selection by Darwin — 

 the one great outstanding discovery in natural knowledge — a 

 discovery of the first magnitude has been that in respect of 

 the laws of heredity that is known as Mendelism, and its 

 author, Mendel, was also a solitary worker. The son of 

 Austro-Silesian peasants, when twenty-one years of age 

 Mendel entered a religious foundation at Briin, and it was in 

 the cloisters there that, becoming interested in the problems 

 of hybridization, he carried out those classic experiments 

 which have, after long years of neglect, revolutionised 

 modern biology, and opened up new vistas of economic and 

 human improvement. And the suggestive fact for us this 

 evening is that it was to the Natural History Society of Briin 

 — a society not larger or more important than the Natural 

 History Society of Dumfries, that Mendel's world-moving 

 experiments were communicated. 



You may think it extravagant to suppose that this little 

 coterie on the banks of the Nith will ever evolve another 

 Mendel capable of drawing aside further the heavy veil that 

 still obscures everything but an eyebrow of the face of 

 Nature, but one never knows what may happen, and, if I may 

 judge by its recent proceedings and by this meeting, the 

 Society is bestirring itself, and is in that state of ferment 

 that precedes active change and re-combination. Looking to 

 the past of this Society, I recall that it once included in its 

 membership in the late Dr Gilchrist a man who, had he been 

 less burdened by official duties and by excessive modesty, 

 might have taken a first place amongst British Naturalists; 

 and in the late Mr Robert Service a man of such keen and 

 sympathetic insight into wild life, that had he devoted himself 

 to writing a book, he might have become a new White of 

 Selborne. Looking at the present of this Society, I perceive 

 that its President has made a really notable contribution to 

 Ornithology, and that Miss Dudgeon (1 do not know if Miss 



