Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 26.djvu/64

xlii he used in combination with, one who in his lifetime was honoured as a ripe scholar and a man of cultivated taste, Mr. John Scandret Harford, of Blaize Castle. Mr. Sanders gave some £200 as a first subscription towards the building-fund, and beyond that we have reason to know that he supplied a deficiency which would have resulted from the breach of his promise by one who had undertaken to subscribe £100. Somewhat early in the history of the Institution he was elected to a distinguished honorary position in connexion with it, and for many years, and till the day of his death, he was one of its vice-presidents. His attachment to the undertaking, and to the important educational objects sought by it, never ceased. He was always a willing subscriber to its funds; and about nine years ago, when it became questionable whether the Museum could be kept up, he gave the princely sum of £1000 towards an Endowment Fund, to be applied to its future maintenance. To the force of his public-spirited example on that occasion the citizens of Bristol are mainly indebted for the preservation and rearrangement of a host of treasures which, thanks also to the untiring zeal of his nephew, Mr. William Sanders, F.G.S., Honorary Curator, are known to and prized by men of science throughout the empire. At the time of his death Mr. Sanders was in the 94th year of his age; but, with the exception of partial deafness, he retained his faculties almost to the last, and within a couple of months of his death he could read small type without the aid of spectacles.

is now eight years since, in the absence of the late Mr. Leonard Horner, who then presided over us, it fell to my lot, as one of the Secretaries of this Society, to draw up the customary Annual Address. I availed myself of the opportunity to endeavour to "take stock" of that portion of the science of biology which is commonly called "palæontology," as it then existed; and, discussing one after another the doctrines held by palæontologists, I put before you the results of my attempts to sift the well-established from the hypothetical or the doubtful. Permit me briefly to recall to your minds what those results were:—

1. The living population of all parts of the earth's surface which have yet been examined has undergone a succession of changes which, upon the whole, have been of a slow and gradual character.

2. When the fossil remains which are the evidences of these successive changes, as they have occurred in any two more or less distant parts of the surface of the earth, are compared, they exhibit a certain broad and general parallelism. In other words, certain forms of life in one locality occur in the same general order of succession as, or are homotaxial with, similar forms in the other locality.

3. Homotaxis is not to be held identical with synchronism without independent evidence. It is possible that similar, or even