ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. 65 



fauna is very greatly to be deprecated. So numerous are the 

 gaps among fossil faunas, owing to the fact that only animals with 

 hard parts and, as a rule, only those that lived in the sea, had any 

 chance of preservation, that the finest palajontological collections 

 are, and must always remain, extremely fragmentary. We have, 

 in the past, fallen into so many and such grievous errors by 

 ignoring the imperfection of the Geological liecord, that we may 

 well hesitate before doing anything that would propagate this 

 mischievous delusion. 



On the other hand, it may be pointed out that our acquaintance 

 with extinct forms of life has increased to such an extent in recent 

 years, that a biologist may well be pardoned for not realizing the 

 vastness and importance of the problems involved in the study of 

 fossils. It can only be a very inadequate idea of the value of 

 palgeontological evidence which leads fossils to be regarded (like 

 the fauna and flora of a newly-discovered territory) as simply sup- 

 plying a few missing links required to fill up gaps in a Natural 

 History classification — or as the appropriate ballast for a Noah's Ark 

 on a scale of national grandeur. Small as may be the whole bulk of 

 a palsBontological collection in the eye of the student of recent forms, 

 its great and transcendent value depends on the fact that the objects 

 composing it belong to the faunas and floras of periods widely separated 

 from the present and from one another. The discovery of a new 

 type of reptiles in the Trias is a very diff'erent matter from the 

 detection of an equally remarkable form living in New Zealand. 

 The latter may, it is true, be a singular survival of some old type ; 

 but the former is an actual landmark in the course of reptilian 

 development ; and by the study of the fossil we are actually brought 

 much nearer to the solution of the problems connected with the 

 history of that development than is possible by the study of any 

 recent form. 



In pointing out how vast has been the progress of our knowledge 

 in recent years concerning the ancient life of the globe, I may 

 remind you of the estimates made by Professor Huxley when 

 speaking from this Chair a little more than a quarter of a century 

 ago. He then characterized " the positive change in passing from 

 the recent to the ancient animal world " as " singularly small ;" 

 and he regarded the extinct orders of animals as not amounting 

 " on the most liberal estimate" to more than one tenth of the whole 

 number known. The evidence which has been accumulated during 

 the last twenty- five years, however, has modified this estimate in a 



