ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE TRESIDENT. 59 



. organisms ; and henco the naturalist who is engaged in studying a 

 particular group of living organisms is the only person competent to 

 deal vrith its fossil representatives. In our laboratories and our 

 museums alike, therefore, fossil remains ought to be studied side by 

 side with the living types which most nearly resemble them, and 

 always by the same investigators. This being the case, it is neither 

 necessary nor expedient that there should be a class of students 

 whose chief concern is with extinct forms of life ; and as for the 

 geologists, they have really no further concern with fossils than just 

 to find them, attach a label indicating the period at which they 

 must have lived, and hand them over to the biologist for study and 

 incorporation in his collections. Any action beyond this can only 

 be regarded, indeed, as an act of usurpation on the part of geolo- 

 gists, and must tend, not to the advancement, but to the injury of 

 true science." 



Such, so far as I have been able to gather them, are the extreme 

 opinions which some biologists now entertain. It may perhaps 

 seem presumptuous on my part to venture to offer a plea for 

 Palaeontology ; but there are considerations which may induce us to 

 regard such a plea as coming better from one whose place in the 

 ranks of the geological army lies nearer its centre than in the 

 Biological wing ; from one who regards Palaeontology as the border- 

 land of the Geological and Biological sciences — a borderland where 

 the cultivators of both ought ever to meet, not for rivalry and 

 aggression, but for the necessities of intellectual commerce and the 

 advantages of mutual help. 



The view of Palseontology which I have ascribed, I believe not 

 unjustly, to some biologists is one which has just such an amount of 

 truth in it as to render it plausible, but at the same time, I cannot 

 help thinking, is one of those half-truths which are proverbially more 

 dangerous than downright errors. Palaeontology is not, as has often 

 been confidently asserted, simply a branch of Biology ; it is equally 

 a part of Geological science, and there are the strongest grounds 

 both of reason and expediency for retaining it in that position. All 

 Geological science is based on the principle that the past can only be 

 interpreted by the study of the present ; Darwin was the intellectual 

 child of Lyell, and the ' Origin of Species ' was the logical outcome 

 of the ' Principles of Geology.' No palaeontologist, worthy of the 

 name, has ever dreamed of studying fossils except in the light 

 afforded by the investigation of their recent analogues. Indeed, if 

 we were to carry out the aggressive ideas of some biologists to their 



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