THE DISCOVERER 93 



on the primeval beach to man as we know him now ; 

 if we reflect that the prodigious change requisite to 

 transform one into the other is made up of a chain of 

 generations, each advancing by a minute variation 

 from the form of its predecessor, and if we further 

 reflect that these successive changes are so minute 

 that in the course of our historical period — say three 

 thousand years — this progressive variation has not ad- 

 vanced by a single step perceptible to our eyes, in 

 respect to man or the animals and plants with which 

 man is familiar, we shall, admit that for a chain of 

 change so vast, of which the smallest link is longer 

 than our recorded history, the biologists are making 

 no extravagant claim when they demand at least many 

 hundred million years for the accomplishment of the 

 stupendous process. Of course, if the mathematicians 

 are right, the biologists cannot have what they demand. 

 If, for the purposes of their theory, organic life must 

 have existed on the globe more than a hundred million 

 years ago, it must, under the temperature then pre- 

 vailing, have existed in a state of vapour. The jelly- 

 fish would have been dissipated in steam long before 

 he had had a chance of displaying the advantageous 

 variation which was to make him the ancestor of the 

 human race. I see, in the eloquent discourse of one 

 of my most recent and most distinguished predecessors 

 in this chair, Sir Archibald Geikie, that the contro- 

 versy is still alive. The mathematicians sturdily 

 adhere to their figures, and the biologists are quite 

 sure the mathematicians must have made a mistake. 

 I will not get myself into the line of fire by inter- 

 vening in such a controversy. But until it is adjusted 

 the laity may be excused for returning a verdict of 

 "not proven" upon the wider issues the Darwinian 

 school has raised. 1 



1 Times, 9th August, 1894. 



