﻿ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. XXvii 



one great chain, ascending from the most simple of organisms to 

 that which occupies the highest place ; in other words, from the 

 Sponge to Man. But while he endeavoured to refer all groups and 

 every variety of animal form to one and the same plan, he never 

 embraced the plausible hypothesis that each higher grade had 

 been improved in the course of ages out of a lower one by transmu- 

 tation ; — on the contrary, he saw in the whole animal creation, one 

 single operation, one great harmonious and divine idea, the various 

 changes being neither due to chance nor to the influence of external 

 circumstances, but being all the result of one and the same original 

 conception*." 



M. Frederic Dubois de Montpereux was born in 1798 at 

 Motiers, in the Canton of Neufchatel. After being teacher in a 

 school at St. Gall, he became, at the age of twenty-one, tutor in the 

 family of a Lithuanian landed proprietor, where he remained ten 

 years. During this time he had access to an extensive library, and 

 acquired a taste for scientific reading. This led him to turn his 

 thoughts to the geology of Lithuania, on which subject he published 

 some original observations in Karsten's Archives for 1830. He next 

 became tutor to a young Polish nobleman with whom he passed two 

 years in Berlin, making the acquaintance there of several of the most 

 distinguished Professors in the University ; and being encouraged by 

 them, and especially by Baron von Buch, to continue his favourite line 

 of research, he accordingly examined the tertiary strata of Volhynia 

 and Podolia, and published a description of those regions in 1831, in 

 a handsome quarto volume illustrated by figures of the fossil shells 

 and a geological map. 



About the same period he made a tour with his pupil through the 

 valley of the Rhine, and afterwards to Denmark and Sweden. In 1 83 1 

 he employed seven or eight months in exploring the banks of the Dnie- 

 per, not confining his attention to the geology of the Ukraine, but 

 also collecting plants and discovering many new species, and extend- 

 ing his inquiries to matters of antiquarian and ethnological interest. 

 His memoirs on these various subjects were printed in 1833 in Kar- 

 sten's Archives and in Bronn's Jahrbuch. 



* Discours Funebre de M. C. Prevost, Mai 1850, Ann. des Sci. 



