president’s address. 
173 
so much care abroad, that there is nothing comparable to 
the environment, which they offer to animal and plant life, 
to be found among the Broads of Norfolk. These have no 
large area of water, no great depths, are fed by no large 
river ; they are, in fact, mere ponds and marshes. 
Are they then worth studying, or is the biologist, who spends 
his energies upon them, wasting his time on things that are 
insignificant ? They do not, perhaps, present the ideal 
field for a limnological research, but it is the field close at 
hand, and though the problems to be faced are not at first 
sight of so striking a kind as are those of big lakes, yet 
I venture to say that a study of them may not only assist 
towards elucidating other problems to be found elsewhere, 
but is of itself specially suitable for the biologist, through 
the very fact that the bodies of water to be dealt with are 
small, and varying only slightly from each other in physical 
conditions. 
I need not dwell upon the fact that the Broadlands offer 
to the naturalist a field practically entirely wild and 
uninfluenced by the operations of man. 
The minute study of a small area, though laborious, is 
more likely to yield real information upon the habits and 
necessities of life of the organism under observation, than will 
the study of a large area, in which the physical conditions 
cannot be so accurately defined. 
The work for the Limnobiologist of the Broads is eminently, 
1 think, bionomical, and it should be experimental as well 
as observational. Fresh water animals, unlike those of the 
sea, are fairly easily kept in tanks, and thus their life 
histories are more easily studied ; and who can say that any 
one species of our fauna or flora is known with such 
thoroughness as to make work upon it superfluous ? Of 
course there is still room for the work of the collector and 
systematise and, as a preliminary to other work, it is very 
necessary that complete lists of species occurring in the 
n 2 
