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.