Produced by Chris Curnow, Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS London: FETTER LANE, E.C. C. F. CLAY, MANAGER
Edinburgh: 100, PRINCES STREET Berlin: A. ASHER AND CO. Leipzig: F. A. BROCKHAUS New York: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS Bombay and Calcutta: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.
_AN INAUGURAL LECTURE DELIVERED 23 OCTOBER 1908_
PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Professorship of Biology was founded in 1908 for a period of five years partly by the generosity of an anonymous benefactor, and partly by the University of Cambridge. The object of the endowment was the promotion of inquiries into the physiology of Heredity and Variation, a study now spoken of as Genetics.
It is now recognized that the progress of such inquiries will chiefly be accomplished by the application of experimental methods, especially those which Mendel's discovery has suggested. The purpose of this inaugural lecture is to describe the outlook over this field of research in a manner intelligible to students of other parts of knowledge.
The opportunity of addressing fellow-students pursuing lines of inquiry other than his own falls seldom to a scientific man. One of these rare opportunities is offered by the constitution of the Professorship to which I have had the honour to be called. That Professorship, though bearing the comprehensive title "of Biology," is founded with the understanding that the holder shall apply himself to a particular class of physiological problems, the study of which is denoted by the term Genetics. The term is new; and though the problems are among the oldest which have vexed the human mind, the modes by which they may be successfully attacked are also of modern invention. There is therefore a certain fitness in the employment of this occasion for the deliverance of a discourse explaining something of the aims of Genetics and of the methods by which we trust they may be reached.
You will be aware that the claims put forward in the name of Genetics are high, but I trust to be able to show you that they are not high without reason. It is the ambition of every one who in youth devotes himself to the search for natural truth, that his work may be found somewhere in the main stream of progress. So long only as he keeps something of the limitless hope with which his voyage of discovery began, will his courage and his spirit last. The moment we most dread is one in which it may appear that, after all, our effort has been spent in exploring some petty tributary, or worse, a backwater of the great current. It is because Genetic research is still pushing forward in the central undifferentiated trunk of biological science that we confess no guilt of presumption in declaring boldly that whatever difficulty may be in store for those who cast in their lot with us, they need fear no disillusionment or misgiving that their labour has been wasted on a paltry quest.