124 K, HUYSHE WALKEY, ESQ., ON 



doctrine of evolution or not. The clock works that have been 

 used as an illustration will go for a certain time, but the clock 

 will stop eventually if there be not some one to wind it up. We 

 must remember that laws are only laws as long as they are 

 continued in their operations by the Divine Creator of those laws, 

 and therefore we can. by no means dispense with the presence of 

 the InBnite Creator simply because we assent to the general idea of 

 evolution. The same speaker seemed to think that the evolution 

 theory was discovered or formulated by Darwin. Now Darwin is by 

 no means the author of the evolution idea. Lamarck long ago 

 formulated the idea as it applied to organisms. Evolutionism, in 

 the wider sense of the term, is due to Herbert Spencer. Darwinism 

 and Evolutionism should not be used interchangeably. , Darwin 

 was not the author of evolution, but of an hypothesis to explain 

 the 'modus operandi of evolution which we may disallow, without 

 discarding the idea of evolution. So far from speaking of an 

 evolution theory, it seems to me that the author of the first paper 

 takes it for granted that evolution is a fact. We may use the 

 term evolution in one sense or another, as the Chairman has said 

 but we cannot get away from the fact of development. Evei-y 

 student of Palasontology knows that there has been development 

 of organization. We do not find the remains of Mammalia in the 

 Cambrian rocks, not any until we reach to the Triassic. We 

 cannot find the remains of birds or even reptiles in the Silurian, 

 or of fish in the Cambrian. But all these are in the Mesozoic rocks. 

 Although evolution maybe denied, we cannot get away from the 

 fact of the development of life forms, and to Darwin and Wallace 

 is due the credit of having formulated the theory that development 

 has been brought about by natural selection. 



There is another point in this paper that I should like to say 

 a word about. The author says, " But this would throw back the 

 time of man's evolution to so vast a date and to a time when we 

 have evei'y reason to suppose the world was utterly unfit for 

 human occupation, that it is practically untenable." I want to 

 know on what evidence it is asserted that " the world was utterly 

 unfit for human occupation " at any time during the Tertiary 

 period — and I will not exclude the so-called Glacial epoch. We 

 find existing forms of life in rocks far earlier even than Tertiary 

 deposits. We find the same forms of life as existed in the 

 Jurassic period, now living in abundance in the Australasian seas, 



