Vice-President's Address. 287 



ment of the individual is a recapitulation of the historic 

 evolution of the race to which it belongs. The meaning 

 of this, when applied to man, is that in his embryological 

 stage we have presented to us, in the short space of nine 

 months, the successive phases of his entire career on the 

 globe since he first emerged from his protozoan swaddling 

 clothes. Moreover, in his completed stage he carries with 

 him some vestiges of his ancestral existence. What pregnant 

 truths are embodied in the following remarks of Professor 

 Huxley : — " He (the investigator) also discovers rudimentary 

 teeth, which are never used, in the gums of the young calf 

 and in those of the foetal whale ; insects which never bite 

 have rudimental jaws, and others which never fly have 

 rudimental wings; naturally blind creatures have rudimental 

 eyes ; and the halt have rudimentary limbs. So, again, no 

 animal or plant puts on its perfect form at once, but all have 

 to start from the same point, however various the course 

 which each has to pursue. Not only men and horses, and 

 cats and dogs, lobsters and beetles, periwinkles and mussels, 

 but even the very sponges and animalcules, commence their 

 existence under forms which are essentially undistinguish- 

 able, and this is true of all the infinite variety of plants. 

 Nay, more, all living beings march, side by side, along the 

 high road of development, and separate the later the more 

 like they are ; like people leaving church, who all go down 

 the aisle, but having reached the door, some turn into the 

 parsonage, others go down the village, and others part only 

 in the next parisli. A man in his development runs for a 

 little while parallel with, though never passing through, the 

 form of the meanest worm, then travels for a space beside 

 the fish, then journeys along with the bird and the reptile 

 for his fellow-travellers ; and only at last, after a brief com- 

 panionship with the highest of the four-footed and four- 

 handed world, rises into the dignity of pure manhood" 

 (" Collected Essays," vol. ii. p. 5). 



By this time you will have gathered, by implication if not 

 by direct statement, that life itself had a beginning, and that 

 this beginning was antecedent to, or at least contemporary 

 with, the earliest geological formations disclosed in the crust 



