302 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



BKITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF 

 SCIENCE, AUSTRALIA, 1914. 



Address by Professor William Bateson, M.A., F.R.S., President. 



Part I. — Melbourne. 



The outstanding feature of this Meeting must be the fact that we 

 are here — in Australia. It is the function of a President to tell the 

 Association of advances in science, to speak of the universal rather 

 than of the particular or the temporary. There will be other oppor- 

 tunities of expressing the thoughts which this event must excite in 

 the dullest heart, but it is right that my first words should take 

 account of those achievements of organisation and those acts of 

 national generosity by which it has come to pass that we are assembled 

 in this country. Let us, too, on this occasion, remember that all the 

 effort, and all the goodwill, that binds Australia to Britain would 

 have been powerless to bring about such a result had it not been for 

 those advances in science which have given man a control of the 

 forces of Nature. For we are here by virtue of the feats of genius of 

 individual men of science, giant-variations from the common level of 

 our species ; and since I am going soon to speak of the significance 

 of individual variation, I cannot introduce that subject better than 

 by calling to remembrance the line of pioneers in chemistry, in 

 physics, and in engineering, by the working of whose rare — or, if you 

 will, abnormal — intellects a meeting of the British Association on 

 this side of the globe has been made physically possible. 



I have next to refer to the loss within the year of Sir David Gill, 

 a former President of this Association, himself one of the outstanding 

 great. His greatness lay in the power of making big foundations. 

 He built up the Cape Observatory ; he organised international 

 geodesy ; he conceived and carried through the plans for the photo- 

 graphy of the whole sky, a work in which Australia is bearing a 

 conspicuous part. Astronomical observation is now organised on 

 an international scale, and of this great scheme Gill was the heart 

 and soul. His labours have ensured a base from which others will 

 proceed to discovery otherwise impossible. His name will be long 

 remembered with veneration and gratitude. 



As the subject of the addresses which I am to deliver here and 

 in Sydney I take Heredity. I shall attempt to give the essence of 

 the discoveries made by Mendelian or analytical methods of study, 

 and I shall ask you to contemplate the deductions which these 

 physiological facts suggest in application both to evolutionary 

 theory at large and to the special case of the natural history of 

 human society. 



Recognition of the significance of heredity is modern. The term 

 itself in its scientific sense is no older than Herbert Spencer. Animals 



