450 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Dec. 



operation of tests which, if applied to the higher races, would 

 amount to torture. Thus, the art of ingeniously tormenting 

 has been exhausted in vain upon the imperturbable sponge, 

 which is so endowed with vital powers as to render its 

 animal nature unquestionable; — lacerated with forceps, bored 

 with hot irons and saturated with the fiercest acids of the 

 chemist, it has never once given any symptom of suffering or 

 sensibility. These facts may be sufficient to show that no differ- 

 ence of a physical or chemical nature can be established 

 between plants and animals in that low part of the organic world 

 where these two great divergent branches have their source, and 

 that any attempt to separate them must be arbitrary and artifi- 

 cial. Here, then, the student of Natural History learns the great 

 lesson of a fundamental unity prevailing throughout organic 

 nature ; he sees exhibited to him a sequence without interrup- 

 tion in the working out of the divine idea of creation from man 

 spiritual and immortal, in whose wonderful organization meet 

 and culminate the structural perfections of all the animals, down 

 to the primary cell in which both vegetable and animal life ex- 

 hibits its simplest form of development. 



Turning now to the third of nature's great kingdoms, I would 

 remark that no one has ever questioned the utility of that study 

 which directs and guides us in our search within the bowels of 

 the earth for the ores and other substances that are at once the 

 sources of national wealth and the supply of human wants and 

 comforts. But while the utility of the study of mineralogy is 

 everywhere conceded, geological research, which is inseparably 

 connected with it, has been regarded not without much suspicion 

 and disfavor. Irrespective of the fact that all quarrying and 

 mining undertakings must be properly based on and directed by, 

 geological knowledge, how different the aspect which a section of 

 country exhibits to the eye of a geologist and of the uninformed 

 spectator. Whether it present sand, gravel or alluvial soil, and 

 in its form, hill or valley, solid rock or detached boulders— all add 

 to the interest and pleasure of the scientific observer. The stone 

 turned up by the ploughman, and which would not interrupt his 

 whistle, or call forth the slightest interest in the stolid wielder of 

 pick and mattock, has, for the geologist, sermons and histories, 

 exhibiting to him mighty changes and wondrous revolutions, that 

 have completely changed the surface of the globe he lives on. 

 The careless laborer breaks the stones that have no other interest 



