SPECIES AND VARIATION. 



(Presidential Address delivered at the Annual Meeting, October 20th, 1906). 



By Dr. G. W. CHASTER. 



Perhaps the greatest difficulty with which a President has to 

 contend in respect of the honourable office he is elected to fill is 

 the choice of a subject for his address. In my case this difficulty 

 has been exceptionally great, for, in the province of natural history 

 which constitutes the speciaHty of the Conchological Society, my little 

 investigations have been limited to the moUusca of our own country 

 and the neighbouring seas. It is obviously therefore out of the 

 question for me to venture to speak upon purely conchological 

 matters to an audience including students of far greater and wider 

 knowledge than myself. I crave your indulgence, then, if I address 

 to you a few remarks upon a series of matters that form, so to speak, 

 a bye-path of all natural history work. This bye-path is apparently 

 too often untrod, or at most is but casually and superficially passed 

 through, although its thorough investigation is a matter of prime 

 importance to the naturalist. 



One has not far to seek in order to discover the reason of this 

 seeming neglect. The naturalist as a rule is far more interested in 

 the objects of his study than in philosophical enquiries : his pref- 

 erences are for the visible and tangible rather than for the abstract 

 and theoretical. The mountain, the river, and the wood, with their 

 varied forms of Hfe attract him far more than do the study and the 

 bookshelf. Nothing could be farther from my purpose than to 

 underrate the value of these instinctive attractions and feelings. It 

 is through their agency alone that students of nature have been led 

 to investigate the varied forms of living creatures and plants ; it is 

 to them that we owe our knowledge of the subject. But we ought 

 at times to pause and reflect upon what Oliver Wendell Holmes 

 called the order of things. We cannot rest content with the mere 

 accumulation of specimens or of facts : our items of knowledge 

 require collation and arrangement, so that we may endeavour to 

 gain some insight into their true significance. 



The usefulness of this process is in no way impaired if we find 

 in the end that we are unable to frame rules and formulae of mathe- 

 matical exactitude. The mere establishment of the fact that we are 

 dealing with variable and varying quantities is important : the 

 recognition of the fact that precise and explicit terminology is 

 unattainable is a great and real gain. Moreover we may, during 

 our investigations, discover collateral issues ot no little interest and 

 importance. 



