xiii PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 
he used in combination with one who in his lifetime was honoured 
as a ripe scholar and a man of cultivated taste, Mr. John Scandret 
Harford, of Blaize Castle. Mr. Sanders gave some £200 as a first 
subscription towards the building-fund, and beyond that we have 
reason to know that he supplied a deficiency which would have re- 
sulted from the breach of his promise by one who had undertaken to 
subscribe £100. Somewhat early in the history of the Institution 
he was elected to a distinguished honorary position in connexion 
with it, and for many years, and till the day of his death, he was 
one of its vice-presidents. His attachment to the undertaking, and 
to the important educational objects sought by it, never ceased. He 
was always a willing subscriber to its funds; and about nine years 
ago, when it became questionable whether the Museum could be 
kept up, he gave the princely sum of £1000 towards an Endowment 
Fund, to be applied to its future maintenance. To the force of his 
public-spirited example on that occasion the citizens of Bristol are 
mainly indebted for the preservation and rearrangement of a host of 
treasures which, thanks also to the untiring zeal of his nephew, 
Mr. William Sanders, F.G.S., Honorary Curator, are known to and 
prized by men of science throughout the empire. At the time of 
his death Mr. Sanders was in the 94th year of his age; but, with 
the exception of partial deafness, he retained his faculties almost to 
the last, and within a couple of months of his death he could read 
small type without the aid of spectacles. 
Ir is now eight years since, in the absence of the late Mr. Leonard 
Horner, who then presided over us, it fell to my lot, as one of the 
Secretaries of this Society, to draw up the customary Annual Address. 
I availed myself of the opportunity to endeavour to “take stock ” 
of that portion of the science of biology which is commonly called 
‘‘ paleontology,” as it then existed ; and, discussing one after another 
the doctrines held by paleontologists, I put before you the results 
of my attempts to sift the well-established from the hypothetical or 
the doubtful. Permit me briefly to recall to your minds what those 
results were :— 
1. The living population of all parts of the earth’s surface which 
have yet been examined has undergone a succession of changes 
which, upon the whole, have been of a slow and gradual cha- 
racter. 
2. When the fossil remains which are the evidences of these 
successive changes, as they have occurred in any two more or less 
distant parts of the surface of the earth, are compared, they exhibit 
a certain broad and general parallelism. In other words, certain 
forms of life in one locality occur in the same general order of 
succession as, or are homotaxial with, similar forms in the other 
locality. 
3. Homotaxis is not to be held identical with synchronism with- 
out independent evidence. It is possible that similar, or even iden- 
