262 the president's address. 



quotes them at length, and adds : " For my part (if my Opinion 

 be considerable) I think that my learned Friend hath sufficiently 

 proved that these Fossil-shells were not brought in by the 

 universal Deluge. He hath made it also highly probable, that 

 they might be originally formed in the Places where they are 

 now found by a spermatick Principle, in like manner as he 

 supposes. Why do I say probable ? It is necessary that at least 

 those, which are found in the Viscera and Glands of Animals, be 

 thus formed ; and if these, why not those found in the Earth ? 

 I shall say no more, but that those who are not satisfied with 

 his Proofs, I wish they would but answer them." Thus even 

 Kay, who was turned out of his Fellowship at Cambridge because 

 he refused to make a declaration with regard to the Solemn 

 League and Covenant demanded by the authorities, allowed 

 himself to be completely enslaved by his own credulity with 

 regard to unverified and, indeed, absurd statements as to the 

 occurrence of marine shells in the bodies of land animals ! 



I suppose that Mr. Lhwyd's quaint hypothesis was almost the 

 last of the many curious attempts that were made to explain 

 the existence of fossils before our modern views on the subject 

 came to be generally accepted. It affords an interesting illustra- 

 tion of the power of uncriticised authority to lead people astray. 

 Unfortunately, however, we cannot do without authority in science. 

 No man has either time or opportunity to prove all things for 

 himself. Progress is rendered possible only by the accumulation 

 of the labours of many workers, each relying upon his fellows. 

 The only safeguard against error is the free exercise of our 

 critical faculty and the due restraint of our natural credulity 

 the original sin of the scientific man. 



Let us turn now to another hypothesis. In 1875 Prof. Huxley, 

 in one of his extraordinarily stimulating essays,* discussed the 

 relation which exists between the composition of the earth's 

 crust and the organisms by which it has been populated. He 

 points out that the great Swedish naturalist Linmeus, who was 

 born in 1707, only two years after the death of Kay, had already 

 enunciated the dictum that "fossils are not the children, but the 

 parents of the rocks " in other words, that rocks originate from 



* "On Some of the Results of the Expedition cf H.M.S. Challenger" 



1875]. Collected Essays, vol. viii. 



