THE COURSE OF BIOLOGIC EVOLUTION*. 

 BY LESTER F. WARD. 



That organic forms are the product of evolution is now not 

 only generally accepted by educated people, but is also fairly 

 well understood as a general proposition. But the special na 

 ture of the evolutionary process, particularly the modus operandi 

 of the laws of development, is only vaguely or crudely com 

 prehended by any but specialists in some branch of biology, 

 and is not clearly understood by 'all of these. In proof this I 

 recall a lecture by Henry Ward Beecher, delivered in this city 

 within a year of his death, in which he attempted to expound 

 the modern scientific doctrine of evolution, but in which he 

 showed that he had no adequate idea of what is meant by the 

 arborescent, much less by the dichotomous character of the 

 process of organic development, and seemed to suppose that 

 the progress from monad to man had been one continuous 

 ascending series. He mentioned, for example, as among the 

 ancestors of man, a number of animals belonging to the Ungu- 

 lata, Carnivora, etc., which are known to be entirely off the 

 anthropogenetic line. 



Such crude exposition of so important a law as that of evo 

 lution can only react against the progress of its acceptance as 

 a scientific truth, and there seems to be great need that the ex- 



*Annual Presidential Address delivered at the Tenth Anniversary 

 Meeting of the Biological Society, January 25, 1890, in the law lecture- 

 room of the Columbian University. 



