THE UNITY OF NATURE. 



By Dr. J. McG. Baxter. 



(Lecture delivered before the Association.) 

 We, as members of the Natural History Association of Mirami- 

 chi, are like children playing with pebbles on the shore while the 

 great Ocean of Truth lies stretched out beyond uf^. And in fact 

 the study of Natural History is only in its infancy the world over, 

 as we can see by the fact that so much is to us a terra incognita, 

 an ocean of doubt, with little islets of truth discovered showing 

 up here and there, but imtnense gaps between. 



The field of course is immense, and the laborers are few, com- 

 l)aratively speaking. We can have some idea of the work that is 

 done when we pick up a book on any branch of the subject that is 

 one hundred years old. We can see how much of what was then 

 considered truth has since been contradicted andproved erroneous, 

 and we can see how nomenclature has varied, how the members 

 of one class have been relegated to another, &c., &c. Old books 

 used to start out with something like this : 



Objects in Nature may be divided into the following classes — 

 1st, Man ; 2nd, The A imal Kingdom ; 3rd, The Vegetable King- 

 dom ; 4th, The ^ ineral Kingdom 



This seems, at first, a natural and indisputable division to 

 which no one can object and no one dispute, but let us look more 

 carefully and see 



In the first place, we must remember that it is man himself that 

 is doing the classifying, and in his pride and desire of self-glorifi- 

 cation, because, forsooth, ''vultum ad sidcra toilet" — ^because he 

 walks upright and looks u]) to the heavens, he must needs place 

 himself alone in a class at the head of all Nature around him. Is 

 he justified in this? I think not. When we come to examine 

 his physical structure particularly, we find that from the crest of 

 the biparietal suture to the last phalanx of the little toe, every 

 bone in his body can be duplicated in every member of the quad- 

 ramana, — from tlie tendinous aponeurosis of the occipito-f rontalis 

 musc'e to the insertion of the abductor minimi digiti, every 

 muscle can be duplicated in the quadramana. Even the peroneus 

 longus, supposed to be peculiar to man alone, has been proved to 



