228 PROGRESS OF MICROSCOPICAL SCIENCE. — [ Muyniy Mjctoseapical 
the Rey. F. O. Morris, Dr. Cobbold, having made a series of remarks 
on Mr. Darwin’s work, said that a true conception of what was or 
ought to be understood by the expression “ equivalences ”—hbotanical, 
zoological, or geological—lay at the very basis of a correct apprecia- 
tion of the significance of the records of animal, vegetable, or sedi- 
mentary roots distributed throughout all time. Further, he ventured 
to assert that the grandeur of the formative scheme of Nature, whether 
testifying to an evolutionary method of production or to a series of 
creative acts, few or many in number, could only be adequately 
realized by the naturalist whose powers of allocation and grouping 
enabled him to grasp the magnitude and infinite import of those rela- 
tions, Dr. Cobbold said he had insisted upon equivalency for years 
past. He then proceeded to deal with the facts of succession, and 
said the earliest organism as regarded time which geology had revealed 
was the fossil called Eozoon, which belonged to the lowermost division 
of the animal series. Dr. Cobbold then described the succession of 
the various known groups, and, glancing at the times of origin and 
succession of the placental mammals, said the first thing that the 
record suggested was the rapidity with which the most divergent 
groups made their appearance. Of course, there was no real basis for 
an assumption of coeval creation, so to speak. It might be fairly 
held, on zoological grounds, that we ought not to separate man and 
monkeys, but retain them as one of the twelve under the ordinal title 
of primates. He adopted the division of the placental into twelve 
groups, not from any rigid belief as to their separate equivalences, 
but because they were not only sufficiently distinctive for all practical ~ 
purposes, and also formed on the whole perhaps the finest expression 
of grouping which science could at present afford. After dwelling at 
great length upon the succession of the various groups, he stated that 
as regarded the highest of all the placental series he would only say 
that, as he understood the doctrine, the strictest demand of the 
development theory did not require, as was too commonly supposed, a 
lineal descent as between bimana and quadrumana; but it was cer- 
tainly held that either of these groups, as we now knew them, might 
have been separately evolved from more generalized primatal types, 
the intermediary terms being possibly connected by a long antecedent 
and far more generalized common progenitor. In that connection 
the most advanced evolutionist must candidly own that the assumedly 
missing tertiary primatals constituted a great and very natural bar to 
the complete and popular acceptance of the theory of descent by 
natural selection. On the other hand, the scientific naturalist, whilst 
admitting these serious deficiencies, threw into the opposite scale a 
multitude of considerations, the collective value of which seemed to 
him to outweigh all the data thrown into the anti-continuity side of 
the balance. For himself, in conclusion, he said that his necessarily 
limited application of those data was amply sufficient to enforce upon 
him the provisional acceptance of any theory of continuity. To his 
mind, its clear application irresistibly implied that nature, to use an 
old phrase, was but a series of harmonies—wheel within wheel, there 
being probably but one wheel differing only from all the wheels of 
