PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 21 
vellous that, to our limited inteiligence, the forces to which 
they are due seem to have been constantly directed in their 
course. The human mind is more disposed to accept the 
idea of guidance than that of pre-determination, as it seems 
to us to be the less impossible of the two, and the more easy 
to understand. We, ourselves, wait upon circumstances, see 
how things are going to shape before we move; and we fancy 
that the world must have been made. and must be carried 
on, on the same principle. But the study of nature gradu- 
ally causes this belief to fade ‘away. The more we learn, 
the more we see that secondary law extends much further 
than we had expected, and we begin to think that all may 
be due to secondary laws. 
We cannot doubt but that the most complicated cases of 
inheritance—such as the growth of the train feathers of a 
peacock, or the gorgeous wings of a butterfly—are due to 
secondary laws, although the processes are quite incompre- 
hensible to us. We believe these to be due to secondary 
laws, because we see them taking place in exactly the same 
order over and over again; and, in the case of the peacock, 
we know that if we pull out the feathers, new ones, s'milar 
to the old, will replace them. So that we can bring these 
laws into play whenever we choose. It is not sufficient, 
therefore, to say that an action is not due to secondary law 
because it is so wonderfully intricate, or because it is in- 
comprehensible to us. We must be able to show, either 
that the action is antagonistic to known natural laws, or 
that the result could not be due to a combination of any 
natural laws that we have already discovered. That is, we 
must show a discontinuity in the phenomena. Can any 
such breaks be discovered ? 
The origin of the material Universe, which was the start- 
ing-point of the present evolutionary process, appears to us 
to have been a new departure in natural law. But we can- 
not feel certain about it, for we do not know, and never can 
know, what went before. But with the origin of life on the 
earth it is different. The intimate structure of organic be- 
ings, as well as their order of development on the earth, 
point to the conclusion that they are all derived from a 
common ancestor, ahd that living protoplasm was formed 
once, and once only, on the surface of the sea. Now, in the 
origin of living substance on this planet we have a case 
which is generally recognised as a break in continuity. It 
is generally allowed that it was an action which is not only 
incomprehensible by us, but one which conflicts with our 
knowledge of natural laws. That an unstable chemica 
