ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 51 



Rev. Joseph Anderson, Waterbuiy, (^onn. 



Mr. H. H. Bancroft, San Francisco, Cal. 



Mr. Ad. F. Bandelier, San Francisco, Cal, 



Dr. Daniel G. Brinton, Philadelphia, Pa. 



Mr. LuciEN Carr, Cambridge, Mass. 



Mr. John Collett, Indianapolis, Indiana. 



Mr. A. J. Conant, St. Louis, Mo. 



Dr. George J. Engelmann, St. Louis, Mo. 



Prof. Basil Gildersleeve, Baltimore, Md. 



Mr. Horatio Hale, Clinton, Ontario, Canada. 



Prof. G. Stanley Hall, Baltimore, Md. 



Col. H. H. Hilder, St. Louis, Mo. 



Dr. C. C. Jones, Augusta, Ga. 



Rev. George A. Leakin, Baltimore, Md. 



Prof. E. S. Morse, Salem, Mass. 



Prof. Raphael Pumpelly, Newport, R. I. 



Prof. F. W. Putnam, Cambridge, Mass. 



Col. Charles Whittlesey, Cleveland, O. 



Dr. Daniel Wilson, Toronto, Canada. 



Mr. H. H, Bates read a paper entitled " Discontinuities in 

 Nature's Methods," of which the following is a synopsis: 



The ingenious analogy drawn by Mr. Babbage, in the ninth 

 Bridgewater treatise, from the operations of his calculating machine, 

 to enforce an argument in favor of the conceivability of miracle, 

 by bringing it under the domain of law, was cited as illustrating some 

 of the discontinuities of evolution, confessedly the result of simi- 

 lar complexities of natural law. 



The great discontinuity involved in the passage from inorganic 

 to organic life, which we infer to have taken place under law, but 

 do not understand, was adverted to. Also such apparent discon- 

 tinuities as the passage from invertebrate to vertebrate life, or the 

 introduction of mammalian life, from lower forms, with the obser- 

 vation that wherever nature seems to have carried specialization to 

 its full extent and to have exhausted the possibilities of structure 

 by mere differentiation she is found to have laid the foundation for 

 a new differentiation, and a new specialization, with higher possi- 

 bilities, from a different stem low down in the scale, constituting an 

 apparent discontinuity, on account of the obscurity and feebleness 

 and instability of the first unspecialized departures, by which they 



