OPENING ADDRESS. 5 
carefully watched, for this kind of paper has a decided 
tendancy to reproduce rapidly—one popular exposition 
leads to another, and it may be if not carefully guarded 
against to half-a-dozen others, and the scientific taste of 
the society becomes depraved. I am inclined to think 
that the downfall or degradation of not a few provincial 
scientific societies could be traced to a too liberal indulgence 
in popular lectures and expositions. 
The second form of paper is the strictly scientific but 
exceedingly uninteresting and even sometimes incom- 
prehensible account of some special point, dealing it may 
be with lists of species or with the details of structure of 
some obscure organ. Such papers being original research 
are extremely valuable, but require to be carefully studied. 
Even a specialist can rarely appreciate them when he 
hears them read for the first time. They should be 
published in the annual volume, and they reflect credit 
upon the society which produces them, but I submit that 
they are not suitable for reading at the meetings. The 
author of such a paper should I think be requested to 
hand his manuscript over to the secretary for publication, 
while at the meeting he should with the aid if possible of 
a few diagrams, or of the black-board and chalk, give in 
the space of about quarter to half-an-hour an intelligible 
account of what his paper is about, commencing with a 
few introductory remarks for the purpose of bringing the 
general biological knowledge of his audience up to the 
point where his special research began, and then explaining 
without going into unnecessary detail what it is that he 
has found out, and what bearing his discovery has upon 
other biological problems. 
A paper may occasionally turn up which is strictly 
original and at the same time is perfectly intelligible and 
interesting. Of course such a one might with great 
