438 TRANSACTIONS OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 



capacity to select, simply a capability to receive such sustenance as the 

 currents mig'lit bear to them in their flow. If there was at any time a fail- 

 ure in the supply of food, this lack would cause degeneracy, and instead of 

 a "struggle for existence," developing new powers in any individual, there 

 would have been loss of vital power from exhaustion, and finally death. 



For the sake of our argument, grant that man was the ultimate design 

 in creation. A position to be assumed, though easily susceptible of dem- 

 onstration. A monad, vibrione, or haderia, will be at one end of the scale, 

 and man at the other ; between the two, and filling up the scale, there will 

 be an indefinite number of circles of life, composed of innumerable 

 number of individuals. 



The organic forces developed by growth in the lower circles, by their 

 death, as we have seen in the vegetable illustration borrowed from our 

 savan, prepared the way, and made possible the higher circles. 



It was the conservation of force in the lower and inferior, that gave the 

 possibility of the high and superior. 



The theory, then, to which we incline, is this. Inasmuch as matter had 

 no inherent power to take on the force of life, but that this force was con- 

 ferred by a power without and superior, so in the further and higher exhi- 

 bition of this force, the same power interfered to carry forward the law of 

 "progression from the simple to the complex," the primal to the ultimate. 



When the old had become effete, and could no longer advance the 

 onward movement, but by its conservation of force, had paved way for the 

 new and higher, and made it possible, at wide intervals of time in the ages 

 of the past, the creative power was energized. New orders were created, 

 new genera multiplied, and new species added to old genera. New circles 

 of life arose within the old, but extending beyond the ancient limits. Each 

 new born performing high and noble functions, until in man, thought, and 

 language, the expression of thought, were superadded to the instincts of 

 the vertebrate. 



Thought is the crowning and most glorious function of the whole. 



Prof Vanderweyde. — In discussing this subject, we must consider that 

 the balance that is kept up at the present day between the animal and 

 vegetable world, was very different at an early period. The equilibrium 

 is now kept up by vegetation ; oxygen gas composes one-fifth of the vol- 

 ume of the air. The plants under the influence of the sun, decompose the 

 carbonic acid gas, setting the oxygen free, and keeping the carbon for their 

 own use. All the carbon in the trunk of a tree is from the atmosphere. In 

 the olden time, during the coal formation, the atmosphere contained a great 

 amount of carbon, so n)uch so that animal life could not exist in that 

 atmosphere. The coal formation was to ptirify the air, and the immense 

 amount of coal now in the earth is the result of that purification. 



The subject for the evening was then taken up. 



Weights and Measures. 



Prof Vanderweyde. — The subject of weights and measures is an impor- 

 tant one. In nearly every town in Europe there is a different system of 

 measurement, and if we travel fifty miles there we will lose considerablo 

 in making change, by the different standards of value in each conmiunity. 



