4 ANNUAL ADDRESS, MDCCCLXX. 



led us, I believe, to bow with reverence before the great 

 Creator, the God, not of one small sphere alone, or one 

 short space of time, but of spheres inconceivable and of 

 time untold. 



There is an error in the study of nature which, I am 

 sorry to admit, preponderates at the present day, founded, 

 however, on modes of reasoning which in some respects 

 may have kept us in the right path, yet, earned to extremes, 

 betoken rather a poverty of the understanding. One 

 of the beautiful features in the study of natural history is 

 that we are irresistibly led from the survey of the nice 

 adaptation of parts in plants and animals to look "from 

 nature up to nature's God." This is wrong according to 

 the school in question ; we have no right to mount so 

 high ; we must discard final causes. The author of a 

 folio volume on the "shoulder girdle" of the vertebrata 

 ends by observing, "Not only is a teleological explanation 

 (that is, a consideration of the design) a mere impertinence 

 in a morphological work ; it is also a biassing hindrance 

 a pretty golden ball that diverts the racer from his course." 

 Say perhaps a golden thread that we should trace in our 

 dry researches, or a source of present return in a prolonged 

 undertaking, of which the eventual profit must be far 

 distant. I do not hold with this school on the above 

 question, nor in their discarding of the reduction of vari- 

 ations, or new appearances in structures, to an antetype 

 exemplar, what the anatomist in question calls the "high 

 priori road. The heart certainly presents the character- 

 istics of a beautiful hydraulic machine, the eye all the 

 dioptric contrivances of an optical instrument ; yet this 

 originates from what do they say ? from the " nature of 

 things," from the " law of development," from " organic 

 force or growth," from the "vital force," or even from 



