104 J. HOPKINSON — ANNIVEESAEY ADDRESS : 



continue to modify, certain species, once wild, which we have 

 hrought under our culture or control — our cultivated plants and 

 domesticated animals. 



When, therefore, towards the close of the last century, the 

 nebular hypothesis was propounded by Kant and elaborated by 

 Laplace, and the theory of the origin of species by evolution was 

 successively advocated by Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, Geoffroy St. 

 Hilaire, Goethe, Lamarck, and other men of less note, but little 

 credence was given to their views, the general belief in the 

 permanency and distinctiveness of species scarcely even being 

 shaken, for, said Prejudice in the garb of Authority, were we not 

 told that the sun was created to give light to the eai'th which was 

 at first in darkness, and that man was made out of the dust of the 

 ground? How then could the earth have been evolved from the 

 sun, or both have been formed at the same time out of a revolving 

 and condensing nebula ; how then could man be a modified 

 descendant of some lower animal ? Surely such ideas were absurd ; 

 those who held them, heretics ! 



"When Lord Rosse's telescope was directed to the nebulae, and 

 many of those hitherto believed to be gaseous were resolved, one 

 after another, into clusters of stars, the nebular hypothesis seemed 

 to be shaken to its foundations, for the inference was natural that 

 with sufficient telescopic power all the nebuloe could be resolved. 

 But the doctrine of evolution received only a temporary repulse, 

 for, upon the discovery of spectrum analysis, it became possible 

 to distinguish a glowing gas from an incandescent solid, and many 

 of the nebulae were proved to be really nebulous. The nebular 

 hypothesis, and with it the more general doctrine of evolution, 

 revived, and it is now generally accepted. Although it is still an 

 hypothesis, it rests upon a solid superstructure of well-ascertained 

 facts. The theory of natural selection bears the same relation 

 to organic evolution as the nebular hypothesis bears to cosmic 

 evolution, and together they show us how the present material 

 universe, and the various forms of life on our globe and perhaps 

 on others, may have been developed by gradual metamorphosis. 



Creation is not now to us, as it was to our forefathers, a series 

 of independent acts, but a continuous process of development, and 

 we are irresistibly led, as Goethe was, to look upon "formation, 

 transformation," as "the Eternal Mind's eternal recreation," this 

 formation and transformation proceeding in accordance with natural 

 laws. Thus may we form an infinitely more exalted idea of the 

 Supreme Lawgiver than has ever before been possible. For this 

 grand conception of creation and its general reception in the present 



