paper, the word "primitive" was ambiguous. It might mean "ancient," but it might also mean "original." There was a tendency at the present time to regard the most degraded and superstitious cults as nearest to the original. This idea was to be deprecated.

The author had omitted direct reference to the Jewish religion. But many members of the Hebrew race had found their way into Asia Minor at least as far back as the days of Joel; and various rites referred to in the paper looked like reminiscences of Jewish ceremonies.

After referring to the Goddess Ma, who might be identified with the Egyptian Goddess Thmei, who was also called Ma, he called attention to the possibility of finding standing stones in Asia Minor similar to those discovered in Palestine.

Colonel C. E. YATES, C.S.I., C.M.G.-With reference to what the Lecturer has told us regarding the custom of sheep sacrifice in Asia Minor, I would just mention that a similar practice is common throughout North-Eastern Persia. When I was Consul-General at Meshed I travelled a great deal throughout that part of the country, and it was a common thing to find myself welcomed on arrival at any place by the sacrifice of a sheep as I alighted from my horse. Also when paying a visit to any local chief or man of importance I often found my host waiting for me at the outer door with a sheep whose throat was cut just in front of me as I arrived, so that I stepped over its blood as I entered his house.

This custom is mentioned, I think, in my book Khurasan and Sistan, published by Blackwood in 1900.

The vote of thanks having been put from the Chair, was carried unanimously, and the author having briefly replied, the meeting separated.

ORDINARY GENERAL MEETING.*

COLONEL T. H. HENDLEY, C.I.E., IN THE CHAIR.

The Minutes of the previous Meeting were read and confirmed.

The Rev. William McKibbin, D.D., LL.D., was elected a member, and the following paper was read by the Secretary in the absence of the Author :-

PLANT-DISTRIBUTION FROM AN OLD STANDPOINT. By H. B. GUPPY, M.B., F.R.S.E. (Honorary Corresponding Member.)

I which is

N this paper I have elaborated a theory of plant

final chapter of my recent book on Plant-Dispersal. It is based on the view that observation can only discover the differentiation of types, the agencies concerned with type-creation being not evident to us.

Many of the most serious difficulties connected with the study of plant-distribution have their origin in the endeavours to discover the centres of dispersion or the homes of genera, tribes, and families, difficulties that are often intensified when we call in the aid of the geological record. Botanists appear to have been more persistent in this direction than zoologists; and we have something to learn from the circumstance that those who have taken the broadest views of distribution have often troubled themselves least with such speculations. If the standpoint adopted in this paper is correct, all such endeavours are misdirected and vain, since the difficulties would arise from an initial misconception of the problem.

The difficulties in distribution created by a misconception of the problem. Let us glance at a few of the difficulties that take their origin from the hypothesis that a genus can only have a

* Monday, April 8th, 1907.

M

single birthplace. Ravenala, a genus of the Musaceæ, offers us very singular instance of disconnected distribution. It contains only two known species, of which one (R. madagascariensis) is the Traveller's-tree confined to Madagascar, whilst the other (R. guianensis) is restricted to tropical South America. Then there is the genus Adansonia, to which the familiar Baobab-tree belongs. Of its four species, two are African, one belongs to Madagascar, and the fourth is Australian. Then we have the genus Mesembryanthemum, which, though mainly African, possesses a few Australian and South American species. Again, the breadth of an ocean lies in each case between the South American, Australian, and African species of Podocarpus. These examples have been selected because they raise the same questions that are suggested by the disconnected distribution of animals like the marsupials and the tapirs. Evidently we are not here concerned with capacities for dispersal.

The testimony of the rocks only adds to our difficulties in the search of the home of a genus. What are we to say, for instance, when many living genera of trees, both tropical and temperate, such as Eucalyptus, Ficus, Liriodendron, Myrsine, Quercus, etc., present themselves in association and without warning in the Cretaceous deposits of North America? How is it possible, again, to speculate on the home of Eucalyptus, when we know that it existed in Mesozoic times both in Europe and in North America? As far as concerns their former wide dispersal, the marsupials and the gum-trees behave in a similar fashion. Where, it may be asked, ought we to look for the home of Liriodendron? Found fossil in the Cretaceous and early Tertiary deposits of North America, Greenland, and Europe, its once numerous species are now only represented by a solitary species growing in North America and China. It would seem, indeed, with this evidence before us, that it is not legitimate to raise the question of a home at all.

But the difficulties are not restricted to the disconnected distribution of genera. The distribution of families presents almost insuperable difficulties when viewed from the standpoint of dispersion from a centre. It would indeed appear that the farther we trace them back in geological time, the wider is their range. Where, for instance, should we look for the home of the palms at present flourishing throughout the tropics but extending far north into temperate latitudes during Eocene times?

With some of the families that are well represented in the geological record we cannot even detect the commencement of the differentiation of their tribes. With the Taxaceæ, for

example, most of the tribes established by the systematist for living forms are to be found in the Mesozoic deposits (see Pilger's "Taxaceæ," Das Pflanzenreich, iv, 5). With a family like the Aceraceae, which practically consists of a single genus (Acer), the sections or subgenera based on the characters of existing species include all the Tertiary forms; and, stranger still, most of the sections of the genus that were confined to one or other side of the Atlantic in Tertiary times possess the same distribution now (see "Acerace" by F. Pax, Das Pflanzenreich, iv, 163). We seem indeed to be rarely able to get at the beginning of things in the distribution of the flowering plants, whether it be a family, a tribe, or a genus.

THE FIRST POSTULATE OF THE THEORY OF DIFFERENTIATION. In those families where we get a glimpse of the differentiation of the tribes we are apparently brought face to face with the differentiation of a world-ranging primitive stock. This is a point of the greatest significance in connection with the standpoint adopted in this paper. If behind the facts of distribution lies the cardinal principle that the farther we trace a type back the more generalised are its characters and the wider is its range, then we should be justified when working out the history of a family in postulating a world-ranging primitive parent type with the subsequent development of centres of differentiation over its area. The means of dispersal would then take a very secondary place as determining distribution except in the case of insular floras. This is the position which I will first endeavour to establish in the elaboration of the theory of differentiation. It will involve the possibility of the development of tribes and even of genera in more than one locality in the area of the family.

THE VIEWS OF MR. BENTHAM AND PROFESSOR HUXLEY.

I will first refer to some of the indications supplied by the great group of the Compositæ. Notwithstanding that it makes a poor show in the fossiliferous deposits, Mr. Bentham, the monographer of the family (see Journ. Linn. Soc. Bot. xiii, 1873), arrived at the conclusion not only that it is a very ancient plant-group, but that its primitive stock was already widely dispersed at an early period of its history. Both the Old and the New World possessed the family at the earliest recognisable stage, America, South Africa, the Mediterranean region, and Australia serving subsequently as "centres of differentiation" and becoming the homes of the tribes. The possibility of

the differentiating process following the same lines at its early stages in distant parts of the world is clearly indicated in these conclusions, though it should be noted that this is not Mr. Bentham's interpretation. Although admitting the very ancient distribution over the world of the primitive stock, this botanist looked for the still earlier centre of dispersion, or, in other words, for the home of the family.

Now, it is noteworthy that Professor Huxley, Mr. Darwin's great lieutenant, in his remarkable paper on the Gentians (Jour. Linn. Soc. Bot. xxiv, 1888), which as a display of method may be regarded as a prophetic leap through two decades, would have nothing to do with centres of dispersion, or with movements of migration in explaining the distribution of this family. In two letters, giving some of his preliminary results, which were written to Sir Joseph Hooker in September, 1886, he says. It is clear that migration helps nothing as between the Old World and South American Flora. It is the case of the tapirs (Andean and Sino-Malayan) over again" (Life and Letters of T. H. Huxley, second edition, 1903, ii, 464–5). His more matured opinions are given in his paper where he says

"The facts of distribution of the Gentianeœ . . are not to be accounted for by migration from any centre of diffusion,' to which a locality can be assigned in the present condition of the world," and he recurs again to the parallel case of the tapirs, pointing out that with those animals "there have been no migrations, but simply local modifications of the genus at opposite ends of the primitive area, with extirpation in the intermediate space." The species of the world-ranging family of the Gentians fall, he says, into four groups, one primary and "least differentiated," to which the South American, the Antarctic, and the Arctic forms mostly belong, and the other three groups" specialised " and comprising the species of the rest of the northern hemisphere. There is, he remarks, " a strange general parallelism with the crayfishes" which, though widely distributed, "become most differentiated" in the northern hemisphere.

Like Mr. Bentham with the Compositæ, Professor Huxley regarded the Gentians as distributed over the world ages since, and this is a most important point for our theory of differentiation. The study of their means of dispersal would have been, no doubt, characterised by him as interesting, but unimportant. The existing Gentians he regarded as the relics of a widely spread Tertiary flora ranging over the two Americas and Eurasia. Like Mr. Bentham again, he is able to dispense largely with geological evidence, and, on a priori grounds, finds no