ANTIIROrOLOGlCAL SOCIETY. 53 



since the dawn of history, on account of the lack hitherto of any 

 discovery in that field commensurate with the important dis- 

 coveries which modified his intellectual progress. Such a discovery 

 would afford, by its results, an instance of a true and beneficent 

 discontinuity. The necessity has always been recognized, and 

 many theories broached which accomplished great temporary re- 

 sults, but failed of permanent fruit for want of confirmation. 



The operation of discontinuities in the complex law of evolution 

 is not always or necessarily beneficent. Nature is not optimistic 

 and discontinuties are known to have occurred which were disastrous 

 and retrograde, as geological history evinces. Dissolution is in- 

 volved in evolution. 



DISCUSSION. 



Mr. Lester F. Ward said that he welcomed the term "discon- 

 tinuity ' ' in this new sense as supplying a need in biology. Its old 

 use to denote actual breaks in the series and the special creation 

 and fixity of species was no longer believed to express a scientific 

 truth. But a special term was needed to designate certain apparent 

 breaks which occur at irregular intervals both in the development 

 of life and of society. Among these he enumerated the origin of 

 life through the introduction of the substance protoplasm, the com- 

 paratively abrupt appearance of vertebrated animals which seem to 

 have been developed from one of the lowest forms of invertebrate 

 life, the equally radical change which resulted in the mammalian 

 type, and the remarkable "short cut" by which man was reached 

 through the lemurian and simian stem, leaving the other great 

 branches, the carnivora, ungidata, etc., entirely out of his path. He 

 had, in, a paper read at a previous meeting, laid special stress upon the 

 similarly sudden introduction of the developed brain of man, with 

 its momentous consequences, as the first and greatest of this series 

 of anthropic and sociologic strides to which Mr. Bates' paper was 

 chiefly devoted. 



In reply to remarks by Dr. Welling and Prof. Thomas inquiring 

 how this kind of discontinuity was to be distinguished from the 

 actual breaks postulated by the old school of biologists, Mr. Ward 

 said that the reconciliation was effected through a recognition of 

 the now well-established law of the ephemeral character of transi- 

 tion forms. The variations of structure which are destined to re- 

 sult in the dominant type take place at a point low down in the 



