428 Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. [No. 4' 



two fasciculi, and Mr. Hall will add a translation of the text and an 

 introduction. 



The recommendation was adopted by the Meeting. 



A communication was received from Babu Eadha Nauth Sickdar, 

 being an abstract of Meteorological observations taken at the Survey- 

 or General's office for the month of April last. 



Mr. H. F. Blanford read a paper on the subject of Dr. Bronn's 

 work on the laws of development of organised beings. 



Mr. Blanford stated that the work, a brief notice of which he 

 proposed bringing before the Society, was written by Dr. Bronn in 

 1855, in answer to a series of prize questions proposed by the French 

 Academy of Sciences in 1853-4. Dr. Bronn's work was adjudged 

 as successful and crowned by the Academy in 1857 and the work it- 

 self published shortly after. Its object was to ascertain the laws of 

 the development of organised beings in time, a question which the 

 recent publication of Mr. Darwin's work had rendered one of general 

 interest, and the work possessed this great merit as evidence in the 

 discussion provoked by Mr. Darwin, that having appeared long before 

 the publication of Mr. Darwin's views, it was unbiassed in its conclu- 

 sions by any controversial spirit. 



The objects of Dr. Bronn's work differed in so far from those of 

 Mr. Darwin's, that the former sought simply to determine the formal 

 laws expressing the nature of the sequence of organisms in time and 

 the relation of that sequence to the parallel sequence of geologic 

 changes, while the latter endeavoured to solve the higher problem of 

 which these formal laws are merely consequences, viz. the modus 

 operandi of the cause to which the succession of varying organisms 

 in past times is due. Dr. Bronn's objects bear the same relation to 

 Mr. Darwin's as those of Kepler and Copernicus, the discoverers of 

 the laws of the Heliocentric Planetary System did to Newton's, the 

 discoverer of gravitation. 



Of the two parts into which Dr. Bronn's Essay was divided, viz. 

 the exposition of the laws of development ; and the proving of these 

 laws by the comparison and analysis of tabular evidence, only the 

 first could be noticed in the brief space of a single lecture. Mr. 

 Blanford's object was simply' to bring to the notice of the Society 

 the general results at which Dr. Bronn had arrived, and would refer 



