•Address of the President at the Annual Meeting. 49 
tributed over very wide geographical areas, and have also an 
extensive geological range ; and that when a collection is 
brought together containing large numbers of individuals of 
one generic type, which appear, however, to belong to several 
distinct species, it very commonly happens that although it 
would be easy to make 6, 8, 12, or 20 species, by selecting the 
most divergent forms, yet that, when the attempt is made to 
sort the entire collection under these types, only a part of it 
can be unhesitatingly arranged around them as centres, the 
remainder being transitional or intermediate forms, for which 
another set of species must be made, if the principle of sepa- 
ration be once adopted. In fact, to such an extent does indi- 
vidual variation often go, that (as in the case of the human 
race) no two specimens are precisely alike ; and there is no 
satisfactory medium between grouping them all as varieties of 
one species, and making every individual a species^ which is 
manifestly absurd. 
Now it evidently requires a much greater amount of care- 
ful and laborious research, thus to ascertain the specific unity 
of forms which would undoubtedly be pronounced diverse by 
a superficial observer, than to erect these into new species ; 
and I cannot but think that he deserves better of science, who, 
by the painstaking collection and comparison of great num- 
bers of individuals, affects a reduction in the aggregate of 
species, than he who, because he meets with a form that he 
cannot find to have been previously described, forthwith 
makes an addition to the vast mass already enumerated ; 
without stopping to determine, by adequate research, whether 
its features of distinction are permanently and constantly 
presented, or whether they are liable to shade-off into the 
characters of the forms previously known.* 
I have dwelt at what may seem disproportionate length 
upon this topic, because I think it is one as to which every 
naturalist of the physiological school is bound to enter his 
protest, upon every suitable occasion, against that spirit of 
* Since the delivery of this address, I have had the pleasure of finding 
that the same thought had been previously expressed, almost in the same 
language, by my friend Dr. Jos. D. Hooker ; who, in a note to his ' In- 
troductory Essay on the Flora of New Zealand ' (which notices many 
flagrant examples of the mistakes of species-makers regarding New Zea- 
land plants), thus remarks : — '* The botanist who has the true interests 
of science at heart, not only feels that the thrusting of an uncalled-for 
synonyme into the nomenclature of science is an exposure of his own 
ignorance, and deserves censure, hut that a wider range of knowledge and 
a greater depth of study are required to prove those dissimilar forms to be 
identical, which any superficial observer can separate by wor^s and a 
name." 
e 
