Concluding remarks and summary

Ladies and Gentlemen, there are, I believe, two schools of thought about summaries: the first I can describe as the ‘chance your arm’ which consists of writing the summary before ever coming to the meeting, and be blowed to what the contributors say. The second is the ‘plodding-pedestrianism' one which consists in cobbling it up as one goes along. I am a lazy chairman, and the first method had considerable attractions for me but, unfortunately, I felt I did not know enough about the subject until I had listened to the speakers, so it really was not feasible. So you have to be content with the second, and you will deduce that at the moment I am suffering from an acute attack of illness, which I can best describe as mental indigestion. I am realizing the difficulty in taking in and summing up quite so diverse a series of papers as we have heard during the past two days — quite apart from the problem of condensing the plant history of three and a half thousand million years into something less than thirty minutes. So you will have to be content with a very disconnected series of remarks, not really a summary, but a sort of magpie assemblage of things that struck me as being particularly interesting in the papers that we have heard — plus perhaps, a few critical points, too.