434 OCEANOGRAPHY, BIONOMICS, AND AQUICULTURE. 



of lore and philosophy which has gathered around inquiries into instinct, 

 breeding, and heredity. I trust that the discussion of matters con- 

 nected with evolution will always, to a large extent, remain with this 

 Section D, which has witnessed in the j>ast the addresses, papers, dis- 

 cussions, and triumphs of Darwin, Huxley, and Wallace. 



When the British Association last met in Ipswich, in 1851, Section 

 D, under the presidency of Professor Henslow, still included zoology, 

 botany, and physiology, and a glance through the volumes of reports 

 for that and neighboring years recalls to us that our subject has under- 

 gone great and striking developments in the forty-four years that have 

 elapsed. Zoology was still pre-Darwiniau (though Charles Darwin was 

 then in the thick of his epoch-making work — both what he calls his 

 "plain barnacle work" and his "theoretic species work"). (See Life and 

 Letters, Yol. I, p. 380.) Although the cell theory had been launched 

 a decade before, zoologists were not yet greatly cencerned with those 

 minute structural details which have since built up the science of his- 

 tology. The heroes of our science were then chiefly those glorious field 

 naturalists, observers, and systematists who founded and established 

 on a firm basis British marine zoology. Edward Forbes, Joshua Alder, 

 Albany Hancock, were then in active work. George Johnston was at 

 his zoophytes, Bowerbank at sponges, Busk at polyzoa. Forbes's short, 

 brilliant career was nearly run. He probably did more than any of his 

 contemporaries to advance marine zoology. In the previous year, at 

 the Edinburgh meeting of the association, he and his friend MacAndrew 

 had read their classic reports (British Association Beport for 1850, p. 

 192 et seq.) "On the investigation of British marine zoology by means 

 of the dredge," and "On south European marine invertebrata," which 

 mark the high-water level reached at that date, and for some time 

 afterwards, in the exploration of our coasts and the explanation of the 

 distribution of our marine animals. At the Belfast meeting, which fol- 

 lowed Ipswich, Forbes exhibited his great map of the distribution of 

 marine life in "Homoiozoic belts." In November, 1854, he was dead, 

 six months after his appointment to the goal of his ambition, the pro- 

 fessorshi}) at Edinburgh, where, had he lived, there can be no doubt he 

 would, with his brilliant ability and unique personality, have founded 

 a great school of marine zoology. 



To return to the early fifties, Huxley — whose recent loss to science, 

 to philosophy, to culture, we, in common with the civilized world, now 

 deplore — at that time just returned from the memorable voyage of the 

 Rattlesnake, was opening out his newly acquired treasures of compara- 

 tive anatomy with papers on Siphonophora and on Sagitta, and one on 

 the structure of Ascidians, in which he urged — fourteen years before 

 Kowalevsky established it on embryological evidence in 1866 — that 

 their relations were with Amphioxus, as we now believe, rather than 

 with the Polyzoa or the Lamellibranchiata, as had formerly been sup- 

 posed. Bates was then on the Amazons, Wallace was just going out 



