MICROSCOPICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY SECTION. 
October 8th, 1877. 
Prof. Boyd Dawkins, F.RS., President of the Section, 
in the Chair. 
The President gave an address in which he brought 
before the notice of the Section the three discoveries in 
Palaeontology which stand out beyond the rest in the record 
of the advance of knowledge in the last session. The 
evidence offered by the Creswell caves as to the progress of 
man in the palaeolithic age, the full proof by Prof. Marsh of 
the intermediate position of the cretaceous birds between the 
reptiles on the one hand and living struthious birds on the 
other, and the filling in of the gap in the pedigree of the 
European horse by Dr. Forsyth Major’s discovery of equus 
stenorus in the pleiocene of Italy. 
He also touched on the problem of evolution, and held 
that the argument against that doctrine based on the per- 
sistence of simple forms such as the invertebrates generally 
was worthless, because simple structure implies simple needs 
and simple environment. The change has ever been simplest 
in the most highly organised. The argument founded on 
our inability to tell the how or the why also is worthless, 
because we know the how or why of scarcely anything 
around us. And lastly that based on the suddenness of the 
appearance of new forms, as for example the Tertiary flora 
and Tertiary mammalia was equally worthless, because it 
depended on the perfection of the geological record and on 
the absurd idea that we are now in possession of every 
part of the record. How imperfect the record is may be 
gathered from the fact that since the Meiocene age the 
