231 



From Dr. John Evans of Washington ; Theodore N. Gill of 

 Brooklyn, N. Y. ; and Alpheus S. Packard, Jr., of Brunswick, 

 Me.; accepting corresponding membership of the Society; — 

 from the Royal Bavarian Academy, Munich, sending their pub- 

 lications ; and from the Committee of the Humboldt Founda- 

 tion, Berlin, asking the cooperation of the Society in the estab- 

 lishment of a fund for the promotion of scientific talent in works 

 on Natural History and distant travels. 



Mr. Nathaniel T. Allen of West Newton, Dr. Gusta- 

 vus Hay of Boston, and Alpheus Hyatt, Jr., of Cam- 

 bridge, were elected Resident Members. 



February 15, 1860. 



Dr. C. T. Jackson, Vice-President, in the Chair. 



Prof. Agassiz made a verbal communication in opposition to 

 the theory of Mr. Darwin, recently put forth in his work on the 

 origin of species. Mr. Darwin he acknowledged to be one of the 

 best naturalists of England, a laborious and successful writer ; his 

 works on the coral reefs, on the cirripeds, and his narrative of 

 the voyage of the Beagle, show him to be a skilful and well pre- 

 pared naturalist ; but this great knowledge and experience had, 

 in the present instance, been brought to the support, in his opin- 

 ion, of an ingenious but fanciful theory. According to Darwin, 

 the primary cell, by a process of differentiation and gradual im- 

 provement by natural selection, has produced all the diversities 

 of animals, in geological and present times. He did not think it 

 fair to compare the present fauna of the world with the fauna of 

 any geological horizon as known in one locality ; and he thought 

 this method of comparison had led to this idea of gradual devel- 

 opment. Animal representatives were as numerous and diversi- 

 fied in early geological periods as now ; he instanced the brachio- 

 pods. In the lowest beds of the Potsdam sandstone we find 

 Lingula ijvima^ and allied species are found in the Silurian, De- 



