ease, its frightful
prevalency; of the 200,000 persons who are said to have died of fever
alone since the Prince Consort's death, ten years ago; of the remedies;
of drainage; of sewage disinfection and utilisation; and of the
assistance which you, as a body of scientific men, can give to any effort
towards saving the lives and health of our fellow-citizens from those
unseen poisons which lurk like wild beasts couched in the jungle, ready
to spring at any moment on the unsuspecting, the innocent, the helpless.
Of all this I longed to speak: but I thought it best only to hint at it,
and leave the question to your common sense and your humanity; taking for
granted that your minds, like the minds of all right-minded Englishmen,
have been of late painfully awakened to its importance. It seemed to me
almost an impertinence to say more in a city of whose local circumstances
I know little or nothing. As an old sanitary reformer, practical, as
well as theoretical, I am but too well aware of the difficulties which
beset any complete scheme of drainage, especially in an ancient city like
this; where men are paying the penalty of their predecessors' ignorance;
and dwelling, whether they choose or not, over fifteen centuries of
accumulated dirt.

And, therefore, taking for granted that there is energy and intellect
enough in Winchester to conquer these difficulties in due time, I go on
to ask you to consider, for a time, a subject which is growing more and
more important and interesting, a subject the study of which will do much
towards raising the field naturalist from a mere collector of
specimens--as he was twenty years ago--to a philosopher elucidating some
of the grandest problems. I mean the infant science of Bio-geology--the
science which treats of the distribution of plants and animals over the
globe, and the causes of that distribution.

I doubt not that there are many here who know far more about the subject
than I; who are far better read than I am in the works of Forbes, Darwin,
Wallace, Hooker, Moritz Wagner, and the other illustrious men who have
written on it. But I may, perhaps, give a few hints which will be of use
to the younger members of this Society, and will point out to them how to
get a new relish for the pursuit of field science.

Bio-geology, then, begins with asking every plant or animal you meet,
large or small, not merely--What is your name? That is the collector and
classifier's duty; and a most