The existence of Cretaceous beds in Canada has long been known, and the coalfields of Nanaimo and Comox, on Vancouver Island, have been correlated with the Cretaceous series, as well as those of Queen Charlotte Island, and that of Alberta eastward of the Rocky Mountains.

The fossils were described by F. B. Meek in 1857, by Dr. B. F. Shumard in 1858, by Professor H. Y. Hind in 1859, Dr. Hector in 1861, Mr. W. Gabb in 1864. These are all descriptions of characteristic Cretaceous mollusca. Only two Crustacea are mentioned, namely, a decapod crustacean, provisionally named Hoploparia Dulmenensis, from the Niobara-Beaton group of Manitoba, and a longtailed decapod from the Pierre-Fox Hills, or Montana formation. These have not been seen by the present writer.

The species now recorded comprise

1. Several examples of a small burrowing form of decapod-macrouran crustacean, belonging to the Callianasside, and common in the chalk of Maastricht and Faxoe, and the Greensand of Colin Glen, Belfast.

The Vancouver Island form is named Cullianassa Whiteavesii.

2. The second is a form of brachyuran decapod, belonging to the family Corystidae, and is represented by two imperfect carapaces, one of which shows the frontal portion well preserved, and is evidently closely related to the genera Eucorystes and Palæocorystes from the Greensand and Gault of England, and especially with Palæocorystes Broderipi, from the Gault of Folkestone. I propose to name this after the discoverer as Palæocorystes Harveyi. The specimens were obtained from the Cretaceous beds of Comox River, Vancouver Island.

3. This form is the most abundant of the crabs met with, and is nearly allied to Plagiophthalmus, but its exact position is somewhat doubtful.

Mr. Harvey writes that he has found this small crab everywhere in the district of Vancouver's Island, where there are marine Cretaceous beds and fossils. I have named it (provisionally) Plagiophthalmus (?) vancouverensis.

4. The fourth specimen is a crab allied to the genus Homola, and is from Queen Charlotte Island, Skidegate Channel, west of Alliford Bay, and was obtained by Mr. J. Richardson. It may be compared with the genus Prosopon (von Meyer), from the Jurassic, with several forms from the Chalk of Faxoe, and with Homolopsis Edwardsii, from the Gault of Folkestone. I have named it (provisionally) Homolopsis (?) Richardsoni, after the discoverer.

These crabs occur in concretionary nodules in the Cretaceous beds of Vancouver, and in black coarse nodules on the beach at Queen Charlotte Island, but they have not been removed far from the parent rock.

It is interesting to notice the close approximation between these North-West American Cretaceous forms of Crustacea and those from the same horizon in Europe, and it seems to indicate that even so late as Cretaceous times the same marine fauna existed over a far wider area than it at present covers. This is true, also, of the abundant molluscan fauna occurring in the same series of beds over very widely separated areas of the North American continent, from Manitoba in the east to Vancouver in the west, many of the genera (and perhaps the species also) being found in our own Cretaceous beds.

[Diagrams of the new forms were exhibited.]

11. Interim Report on the Registration of Type Specimens.

12. Twenty-third Report on Erratic Blocks.-See Reports, p. 430.

SECTION D.-ZOOLOGY (INCLUDING ANIMAL PHYSIOLOGY).

PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION-WILLIAM A. HERDMAN, D.Sc., F.R.S., F.R.S.E., F.L.S., Professor of Natural History in University College, Liverpool.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12.

:

The President delivered the following Address :

THIS year, for the first time in the history of the British Association, Section D meets without including in the range of its subject-matter the Science of Botany. Zoology now remains as the sole occupant of Section D-that Fourth Committee of Sciences,' as it was at first called, more than sixty years ago, when our subject was one of that group of biological sciences, the others being Botany, Physiology, and Anatomy. These allied sciences have successively left us. Like a prolific mother our Section has given rise one after another to the now independent Sections of Anthropology, Physiology, and Botany. Our subject-matter has been greatly restricted in scope, but it is still very wide-this year, when Section I devoted to the more special physiology of the medical physiologist does not meet, perhaps a little wider than it may be in other years, since we are on this occasion credited with the subject 'Animal Physiology-surely always an integral part of Zoology! It is to be hoped that this section will always retain that general and comparative physiology which is inseparable from the study of animal form and structure. The late Waynflete Professor of Physiology at Oxford, in his Newcastle Address to this Section, said that every appreciable difference in structure corresponds to a difference of function,' and his successor, the present Waynflete Professor, has shown us how pointless is structure apart from function, and how baseless and unstable is function apart from structure' -the 'argument for the simultaneous examination of both in that science of Zoology which we profess is, to my mind, irresistible.

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We include also in our subject-matter, besides the adult structure and the embryonic development of animals, their distribution both in space and time, the history and structure of extinct forms, speciography and classification, the study of the habits of animals and all that mass of lore and philosophy which has gathered around inquiries into instinct, breeding, and heredity. I trust that the discussion of matters connected with Evolution will always, to a large extent, remain with this Section D, which has witnessed in the past the addresses, papers, discussions, and triumphs of Darwin, Huxley, and Wallace.

When the British Association last met in Ipswich, in 1851, Section D, under the Presidency of Professor Henslow, still included Zoology, Botany, and Physiology, and a glance through the volumes of reports for that and neighbouring years

1 Burdon-Sanderson-British Association Report for 1889.

2 Gotch-Presidential Address to Liverpool Biological Society, vol. ix. 1894.

recalls to us that our subject has undergone great and striking developments in the forty-four years that have elapsed. Zoology was still pre-Darwinian (though Charles Darwin was then in the thick of his epoch-making work-both what he calls his 'plain barnacle work' and his theoretic species work'). Although the cell-theory had been launched a decade before, zoologists were not yet greatly concerned with those minute structural details which have since built up the science of Histology. The heroes of our science were then chiefly those glorious field naturalists, observers, and systematists who founded and established on a firm basis British Marine Zoology. Edward Forbes, Joshua Alder, Albany Hancock were then in active work. George Johnston was at his zoophytes, Bowerbank at sponges, Busk at polyzoa. Forbes' short brilliant career was nearly run. He probably did more than any of his contemporaries to advance marine zoology. In the previous year, at the Edinburgh meeting of the Association, he and his friend McAndrew, had read their classic reports, On the Investigation of British Marine Zoology by means of the Dredge,' and 'On South European Marine Invertebrata,' which mark the high water level reached at that date, and for some time afterwards, in the exploration of our coasts and the explanation of the distribution of our marine animals. At the Belfast meeting, which followed Ipswich, Forbes exhibited his great map of the distribution of marine life in 'Homoiozoic Belts.' In November, 1854, he was dead, six months after his appointment to the goal of his ambition, the professorship at Edinburgh, where, had he lived, there can be no doubt he would, with his brilliant ability and unique personality, have founded a great school of Marine Zoology.

To return to the early fifties, Huxley-whose recent loss to science, to philosophy, to culture, we, in common with the civilised world, now deplore—at that time just returned from the memorable voyage of the 'Rattlesnake,' was opening out his newly acquired treasures of comparative anatomy with papers on Siphonophora and on Sagitta, and one on the structure of Ascidians, in which he urged-fourteen years before Kowalevsky established it on embryological evidence in 1866 that their relations were with Amphioxus, as we now believe, rather than with the Polyzoa or the Lamellibranchiata, as had formerly been supposed. Bates was then on the Amazons, Wallace was just going out to the Malay Archipelago, Wyville Thomson, Hincks, and Carpenter, the successors of Forbes, Johnston, and Alder, were beginning their life-work. Abroad that great teacher and investigator, Johannes Müller, was training amongst his pupils the most eminent zoologists, anatomists, and physiologists of the succeeding quarter century. In this country, as we have seen, Huxley was just beginning to publish that splendid series of researches into the structure of nearly all groups in the animal kingdom, to which comparative anatomy owes so much.

In fact, the few years before and after the last Ipswich meeting witnessed the activity of some of the greatest of our British zoologists-the time was pregnant with work which has since advanced, and in some respects revolutionised our subject. It was then still usual for the naturalist to have a competent knowledge of the whole range of the natural sciences. Edward Forbes, for example, was a botanist and a geologist, as well as a zoologist. He occupied the chair of Botany at King's College, London, and the presidential chair of the Geological Section of the British Association at Liverpool in 1854. That excessive specialisation, from which most of us suffer in the present day, had not yet arisen; and in the comprehensive, but perhaps not very detailed, survey of his subject taken by one of the field naturalists of that time, we find the beginnings of different lines of work, which have since developed into some half-dozen distinct departments of zoology, are now often studied independently, and are in some real danger of losing touch with one another (see diagram).

The splendid anatomical and morphological' researches of Huxley and Johannes Müller have been continued by the more minute histological or cellular work rendered possible by improvements of the microtome and the microscope,

1 See Life and Letters, vol. i. p. 380.

2 British Association Report for 1850, p. 192-et seq.

until at last in these latter years we investigate not merely the cellular anatomy of the body, but the anatomy of the cell-if indeed we are permitted to talk of 'cell' at all, and are not rather constrained to express our results in terms of 'cytomicrosomes,' 'somacules,' or 'idiosomes,' and to regard our morphological unit, the cell, as a symbiotic community containing two colonies of totally dissimilar organisms. To such cytological investigations may well be applied Lord Macaulay's aphorism, 'A point which yesterday was invisible is its goal to-day, and will be its starting point to-morrow.'

Somewhat similar advances in methods have led us from the life-histories studied of old to the new and fascinating science of embryology. The elder MilneEdwards and Van Beneden knew that in their life-histories Ascidians produced tadpole-like young. Kowalevsky (1866) showed that in their embryonic stages these Ascidian tadpoles have the beginnings of their chief systems of organs formed in essentially the same manner and from the same embryonic layers as in the case of the frog's tadpole or any other typical young vertebrate; and now we are not content with less than tracing what is called the 'cell-lineage of such Ascidian embryos, so as to show the ancestry and descendants, the traditions peculiarities of, and influences at work upon each of the embryonic cells-or areas of protoplasm-throughout many complicated stages. And there is now opening EVOLUTION

up from this a great new field of experimental and mechanical' embryology, in which we seek the clue to the explanation of particular processes and changes by determining under what conditions they take place, and how they are affected by altered conditions. We are brought face to face with such curious problems as, Why does a frog's egg, in the two-celled stage, of which one half has been destroyed, develop into half an embryo when it is kept with one (the black) surface uppermost, and into-not half an embryo, but-a whole embryo of half the usual size if kept with the other (the white) surface upwards. Apparently, according to the conditions of the experiment, we may get half embryos or whole embryos of half size from one of the first two cells of the frog's egg.

2

One of the most characteristic studies of the older field naturalists, the observation of habits, has now become, under the influence of Darwinism, the 'Biono

'See Watasé in Wood's Holl Biological Lectures, 1893.

2 See Morgan, Anat. Anzeig., 1895, . Bd. p. 623, and recent papers by Roux, Hertwig, Born, and O. Schultze.

mics' of the present day, the study of the relations between habit and structure and environment a most fascinating and promising field of investigation, which may be confidently expected to tell us much in the future in regard to the competition between species, and the useful or indifferent nature of specific characters.

Other distinct lines of zoological investigation, upon which I shall not dwell, are geographical distribution and paleontology-subjects in which the zoologist comes into contact with, and may be of some service to his fellow-workers in geology. And there still remains the central avenue of the wide zoological domain-that of speciography and systematic zoology-which has been cultivated by the great classifiers and monographers from Linnæus to Haeckel, and has culminated in our times in the magnificent series of fifty quarto volumes, setting forth the scientific results of the 'Challenger' Expedition; a voyage of discovery comparable only in its important and wide-reaching results with the voyages of Columbus, Gama, and Magellan at the end of the fifteenth century. It is now so long since the 'Challenger' investigations commenced that few I suppose outside the range of professional zoologists are aware that, although the expedition took place in 1872 to 1876, the work resulting therefrom has been going on actively until now-for nearly a quarter of a century in all-and in a sense, and a very real one, will never cease, for the 'Challenger' has left an indelible mark upon science, and will remain through the ages exercising its powerful, guiding influence, like the work of Aristotle, Newton, and Darwin.

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Most of the authors of the special memoirs on the sea and its various kinds of inhabitants, have interpreted in a liberal spirit the instructions they received to examine and describe the collections entrusted to them, and have given us very valuable summaries of the condition of our knowledge of the animals in question, while some of the reports are little less than complete monographs of the groups. I desire to pay a tribute of respect to my former teacher and scientific chief, Sir Wyville Thomson, to whose initiative, along with Dr. W. B. Carpenter, we owe the first inception of our now celebrated deep-sea dredging expeditions, and to whose scientific enthusiasm, combined with administrative skill, is due in great part the successful accomplishment of the Lightning,' the Porcupine,' and the Challenger' Expeditions. Wyville Thomson lived long enough to superintend the first examination of the collections brought home, their division into groups, and the allotment of these to specialists for description. He enlisted the services of his many scientific friends at home and abroad, he arranged the general plan of the work, decided upon the form of publication, and died in 1882 after seeing the first ten or twelve zoological reports through the press.

Within the last few months have been issued the two concluding volumes of this noble series, dealing with a summary of the results, conceived and written in a masterly manner by the eminent editor of the reports, Dr. John Murray. An event of such first-rate importance in zoology as the completion of this great work ought not to pass unnoticed at this zoological gathering. I desire to express my appreciation and admiration of Dr. Murray's work, and I do not doubt that the Section will permit me to convey to Dr. Murray the congratulations of the zoologists present, and their thanks for his splendid services to science. Murray, in these Summary' volumes, has given definiteness of scope and purpose, and a tremendous impulse, to that branch of science-mainly zoological-which is coming

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to be called

OCEANOGRAPHY.

Oceanography is the meeting ground of most of the sciences. It deals with botany and zoology, including animal physiology'; chemistry, physics, mechanics, meteorology, and geology all contribute, and the subject is of course intimately connected with geography, and has an incalculable influence upon mankind, his distribution, characteristics, commerce, and economics. Thus oceanography, one of the latest developments of marine zoology, extends into the domain of, and ought to find a place in, every one of the sections of the British Association.

Along with the intense specialisation of certain lines of zoology in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it is important to notice that there are also lines