The annual meeting of the British Association opened on Wednesday
at Bradford. Sir William Turner, the new President, dealt in his inaugural address with the progress made during the past century in his own special line of study,—viz., the science of the structure and organisation of the bodies of men and animals. After briefly recapitulating the various provisional hypotheses held by earlier investi- gators, and laying stress on the immense impulse given to research by improvements in the microscope and other methods and appliances, Sir William found the great starting point of modern biological science in Schwann's enunciation of the principle that the elementary tissues consisted of cells, and thence proceeded to a minute review of the progress of our knowledge of these "visible anatomical units." A great step in advance was made by the establishment of the proposition that cell-formation was a continuous development by descent—the ortrais cdZula e eellula of Virchow—as opposed to the doctrine of spontaneous generation or abiogenesis, now virtually abandoned.
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