Abstract
HAVING now for the tenth time the honour of addressing you from this chair on the occasion of your annual gathering, it has been my wish to lay before you a general sketch of the progress making in systematic Biology, the foundation upon which must rest the theoretical and speculative, as well as the practical, branches of the science, to report upon the efforts made further to investigate, establish, and extend that foundation, and to convert the numerous quicksands with which it is beset into solid rock. This subject formed the chief portion of my address of 1862, and again of those of 1866 and 1868; but on the present occasion I have had some difficulties to contend with Mr. Dallas, to whose kindness I owed the zoological notes I required, has now duties which fully absorb his time, and I have been obliged to apply to foreign correspondents, as well as to my zoological friends at home, for the necessary information. They have one and all responded to my call with a readiness for which I cannot too heartily express my thanks; and if there is some diversity in the extent and nature of the information I have received from different countries, which may prevent any very correct estimate of the comparative progress made in them, it is owing to the questions which I put having been stated too generally, and, though sent in the same words to my different correspondents, they have been differently understood by them. In such a review, however, as I am able to prepare, I propose chiefly to consider the relative progress made by zoologists and botanists in the methods pursued and the results obtained, in the first place as to general works common to all countries, and secondly as to those which are more particularly worked out in or more specially relate to each of the principal states or nations where biological science is pursued, prefacing this review by a few general remarks supplementary to those I laid before you in my first address in 1862.
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Mr. Bentham's Anniversary Address to the Linnean Society . Nature 4, 92–94 (1871). https://doi.org/10.1038/004092a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/004092a0