OCEANOGRAPHY, BIONOMICS, AND AQTTICULTTTRE. 



By William A. Herdman, F. R. S. 



This year, for tlie first time in the history of the British Association, 

 Section D meets without including in the range of its subject-matter 

 the science of botany. Zoology now remains as the sole occupant of 

 Section D — that " Fourth Committee of Sciences," as it was at first 

 called, more than sixty years ago, when our subject was one of that 

 group of biological sciences, the others being botany, physiology, and 

 anatomy. These allied sciences have successively left us. Like a 

 prolific mother, our section has given rise one after another to the now 

 independent sections of anthropology, physiology, and botany. Our 

 subject-matter has been greatly restricted in scope, but it is still very 

 wide — this year, when Section I, devoted to the more special physiology 

 of the medical physiologist, does not meet, perhaps a little wider thai) 

 it may be in other years, since we are on this occasion credited with 

 the subject "Animal physiology" — surely always an integral part of 

 zoology! It is to be hoped that this section will always retain that 

 general and comparative physiology which is inseparable from the study 

 of animal form and structure. The late Waynflete professor of physi- 

 ology at Oxford, in his Newcastle address to this section, said "that 

 every appreciable difference in structure corresponds to a difference of 

 function" (Burdon-Sauderson, British Association Report for 1889), 

 and his successor, the present Waynflete professor, has shown us "how 

 pointless is structure apart from function, and how baseless and unsta- 

 ble is function apart from structure" (Gotch, "Presidential address to 

 Liverpool Biological Society," Vol. IX, 1894) — the " argument for the 

 simultaneous examination of both" in that science of zoology which 

 we profess is, to my mind, irresistible. 



We include also in our subject-matter, besides the adult structure 

 and the embryonic development of animals, their distribution both in 

 space and time, the history and structure of extinct forms, speciography 

 and classification, the study of the habits of animals and all that mass 



'Opening address at tbe Ipswich meeting of the British Association for the 

 Advancement of Science, 1895. By William A. Herdman, D. Sc, F. E. S., F. L. S., 

 F. R. S. E., professor of natural history in University College. Printed in Report of 

 the British Association, 1895, and in Nature, No. 1351, vol. 52, September 19, 1895, 



433 

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