Febkuart 24, 1911] 



SCIENCE 



291 



ence. Competent men in all cases and in 

 many equipped to speak with supreme 

 authority, presented the propositions of the 

 science from the point of view of their 

 special lines of interest, and though on 

 every topic brought under consideration 

 much more might have been effectively 

 said, yet the sum of the matter was to set 

 before the mind, in part at least in in- 

 imitable form, the scope of the science. 

 The veiy nature and diversity of our in- 

 terests are both our weakness and our 

 strength. Our nature is trinitarian: 

 whenever we cease to be held together by 

 the centripety of a com in on broad unity, 

 to keep our feet together on the platform 

 of common concern, then we fly apart into 

 our lesser orbits. If I could venture there- 

 fore out of my experience with the larger 

 world, to urge one consideration of para- 

 mount concern on my successors in this 

 office, it would be that on these occasions 

 of annual reunion sight never be lost of 

 our major purpose and no risk ever be 

 invited of swamping our unity in the sea 

 of details. Let us not blind ourselves to 

 the beauty of the forest by seeing only the 

 trees in it. 



II. THE SIGNIFICANCE OP CERTAIN EARLY 

 PARASITIC CONDITIONS 



I propose now to turn your attention 

 with reasonable brevity, and as a conclu- 

 sion of this address, to a series of consid- 

 erations which I am disposed to believe, 

 when more fully illuminated by a patient 

 and persistent accumulation of facts, may 

 have a wider application to interests of 

 immediate moment to society. In the ac- 

 quisition of the evidences of the earliest 

 phases of the parasitic or dependent condi- 

 tion of life I have been somewhat assiduous 

 — enough at least to realize, as every one 

 must in entering such a field, how much 

 remains to be acquired and how many 



illustrations of it still lie in our great 

 museums unrecognized or unstudied. The 

 appreciation of the parasitic conditions of 

 to-day depends so wholly on the adaptations 

 in the physiology and soft anatomy of 

 organisms, that to seek such clues as these 

 among the rocks may seem like entering a 

 blind cavern without a torch. Volumes 

 have been written and volumes more would 

 be necessary to portray the aspects of de- 

 pendent life in living nature from the sim- 

 plest organic subjection among the bacteria 

 to the most complicated expression in hu- 

 man society, and with these before our eyes 

 I believe it possible eventually to resolve 

 from the record of the past the problems 

 of the origination of such dependent con- 

 ditions. 



Whatever attitude you and I may take 

 as paleontologists toward the conceptions 

 of Le Dantec and his followers, that the 

 whole panorama of life is being renewed 

 from its beginning every day in the scenes 

 of the present world, these at least can not 

 cover the transactions of organic depend- 

 ence in which the time element is the most 

 illuminating factor in its existence. What 

 I have to offer at present is a very brief 

 statement of a few suggestive facts and of 

 certain justifiable inferences of broader 

 scope which rank, I believe, in the category 

 of continuous effects. 



In the effort to find the real significance 

 of this vital relation I have purposely con- 

 fined my observations, so far as the fossils 

 are concerned, to those within the Paleozoic. 

 There have entered into the literature of 

 fossil dependents straggling and usually 

 quite incidental records of symbiosis in the 

 eras later than the Paleozoic, but none of 

 these eras which approach near to the pres- 

 ent has added, so far as my knowledge 

 extends, any essential clues to the origina- 

 tion of this condition. This is naturally 

 so, for the advanced life of the Neozoic 



