720 Proceedings. 



hours day and a twelve-hours night will do in the Torrid Zone. Hence, 

 I think it m.ay be assumed that in the earlier periods of the earth the 

 polar regions were warm regions, and were possibly the abode of organic 

 life earlier — indeed, much earlier — than the Temperate and Torrid Zones, 

 unless the land in those zones was very much higher than the land in 

 the Frigid Zones, which is improbable. How long the north and south 

 polar regions continued to be favourable to the development of animal 

 and vegetable life cannot be ascertained with any degree of certainty, but 

 there is plenty of evidence even now to prove that both plants and 

 animals of tropical, subtropical, aod warm temperate facies lived in 

 those regions even as late as the Tertiary period. But such evidence, 

 though valuable as showing that a warm climate once prevailed where 

 now ice and snow of immense depth and thickness are to be fovmd the 

 year round, is not sufficient to determine whether the north and south 

 zones were the first abodes of organic life on the earth. In order to deter- 

 mine this we require to deal with a succession of geological time-periods 

 long anterior to the Tertiarj- — from the time, in fact, when the rocks give 

 evidence that life had appeared on the earth to the present day, when 

 differentiation is so marked in each of the three natural kingdoms. If 

 traces of organic life could be found in the older rocks of the Frigid Zones, 

 showing a gradual progress from the lowest forms of animal and vegetable 

 life up to the types of fossil life found among the Tertiary rocks of those 

 zones, the evidence would be complete ; but there is no such evidence 

 yet to hand. So far as acquaintance has yet been made with the stratified 

 rocks in the various continents, it is found that the lowest organisms and 

 simplest forms of animal and vegetable life appeared in the oldest rocks, 

 and as we pass upward in the series through the Paleeozoic, Mesozoic, and 

 Tertiary ages we find not only traces of increased life, but also traces of 

 progressive life from lower to higher types. But it is hardly possible to 

 account for progressive forms of life, with their attendant variations, 

 except on the supposition that in the course of time such climatic 

 changes took place that the earth became better adapted to the mainten- 

 ance of higher forms, and that the life that was before the changes 

 began adapted itself to the new conditions as they were in progress. To 

 change meant to live, then, as it does now. In the case of a cooling 

 earth, every climatic change that produces greater seasonal contrasts 

 tends to greater differentiations in the organic world. The geological 

 records show that life, which began with the lowest forms, has progressed 

 by a series of differentiations and adaptations ; that from the simple it 

 has gone on to the complex, and from the complex to the yet more com- 

 plex. From the cell to the tissue, from the tissue to the individual, from 

 the individual to the species, and so on to the class, the genus, and the 

 order — such is the progress of life, and such its development in time, as 

 told on the tablet-stones of the past. And does not this progress from 

 the lower to the higher, from the simple to the complex, in the organic 

 world strike the keynote as to the incoming of new forms of diseases by 

 new adaptations of lowly organisms in the physical world, operating, as 

 Darwin points out, through countless millions of years ? We cannot 

 suppose that differentiations and new adaptations have not their at- 

 tendant ills. The body will be rendered liable to disease of new forms 

 and new kinds, just as it undergoes variations and new developments. 

 Adaptations are in progress now, as they have ever been ; and, while 

 scientific skill may and will continue to discover means to lessen pain 

 and diminish sviffering, science will not, cannot, free humanity from 

 the ills that flesh is heir to through the ages ; for, try how wo may, 

 science will never be able to transform the body mortal into the body 

 immortal." 



