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nature we learn of the same harmonious reign of law through 

 countless ages. Geology is the record of the past : and with its 

 aid I invite you to turn for a moment to that testimony of the 

 rocks which the palaeontologist has deciphered for us; testi- 

 mony which embodies the history of life through all the aeons 

 back to the eozoic dawn. Biologist and palaeontologist had alike 

 recognized the orderly progression, as, in apt accordance with 

 your metaphor, they turned over page after page of graven 

 strata, till the record of life closed or seemed to close, in the 

 azoic rocks. But the great naturalist, Charles Darwin, who so 

 recently passed away, has revolutionized biological science 

 with the demonstration of that process of evolution which has 

 guided all the manifestations of life from the lowest to 

 higher forms. Here accordingly a new reign of law appears, 

 as we recognize one after another of the progressive steps 

 through which, in the calm, unresting process of evolution, life 

 has advanced onwards and upwards into ever more complex 

 forms, through countless ages fashioning the present out of all 

 the past. Yet here I, for one, -I know not how far others may 

 sympathize with me, but I am constrained to pause upon the 

 threshold of that essentially distinct sphere of the psychologist 

 where man, with reason as his distinctive attribute, stands 

 apart from the whole irrational creation. It is not as a mere 

 matter of sentiment, nor even because of any too literal read- 

 ing of the narrative of creation, when man " became a living 

 soul," that I feel constrained to withhold assent to the hypothe- 

 sis of the evolution of mind. By no inductive process does it 

 seem to me possible to find the genesis of reason in any mani- 

 festations of intelligence in the brute creation. The difference 

 between a Newton and an Australian savage is trifling when 

 compared with the great gulf that separates the latter from 

 the highest anthropoid. I look in vain in. all the many mani- 



