Section D. 
BIOLOGY. 
ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT, 
PROFESSOR, ARTHUR DENDY, D.Sc. 
THE CRYPTOZOIC FAUNA. OF AUSTRALASIA. 
The subject upon which I have the honour to address you to-dav 
is one in which I have personally been deeply interested ever since my 
first arrival in Australia seven years ago, and in the knowledge of 
which a considerable amount of progress has been made of late years 
by many Australasian naturalists. It would, however, be impossible 
for any one zoologist to give a complete account of our cryptozoic 
fauna, partly owing to the fact that much work still remains to he 
accomplished in the field, and partly because in these days of specialisa- 
tion no one man could presume to deal competently with so many 
different branches of zoology as are involved. If, therefore, I seem 
to lay undue stress upon those parts of the subject which I have 
personally investigated, and to give less than its due share of attention 
to the work of others, I hope it will not be thought that I am wanting 
in respect for other observers. Such is far from being the case, and I 
hope that the many omissions which this address must needs contain 
will be put down to the superficial nature of my knowledge of those 
groups of animals which I have not myself studied in detail. 
I must also apologise for making such free use of a term coined 
by myself, and hardly perhaps as yet in general circulation amongst 
biologists. I can only plead that I use the word Cryptozoic” for 
want of a better. Five years ago it appeared to me that the 
assemblage of small terrestrial animals found dwelling in darkness 
beneath stones, rotten logs, and the bark of trees, and in other similar 
situations, was well deserving of study in its entirety, and that it 
constituted a section of the terrestrial fauna quite as distinct from the 
remainder as, for example, the littoral or abyssal fauna is from the 
remainder of the marine fauna. 
Of course no fauna can he sharply defined from those which 
verge upon it. The littoral fauna passes gradually into that of the deep 
sea on the one hand, and that of the open ocean on the other. So it is 
also with the cryptozoic fauna, which passes, on the one hand, into the 
burrowing fauna, composed of animals which burrow for themselves 
beneath the surface of the earth, and on the other into the vast 
assemblage of animals which live in open daylight. 
