134 REV. JOHN GERARD, F.L.S., ON SPECIES AND THEIR ORIGIN. 
the beginning. Such we find to be the case in those wonderful 
researches as to the constitution of matter which are so marked 
an achievement of our own day, but which, beyond the fact 
that they reveal the existence of laws whereof we previously 
had no inkling, do but enhance the bewildering mystery of the 
universe in which we dwell. Of this only may we feel assured 
that we shall never arrive at any region which coes not furnish 
matter for science, in which we do not find order and not chaos 
—a universe rationally explicable, bearing the stamp of mind 
whereof we see a reflection in our own. 
As Sir John Herschel declared*: “The presence of mind in 
the universe is what can alone supply such explanation of her 
constitution and operations as shall harmonise with our own 
experience.” 
So it is with inorganic nature ; so in an even more marvellous 
degree with the hosts of organic life. Many a species of both 
plants and avimals wears the family livery, including seemingly 
trivial and insignificant details, in regions the most diverse and 
under every variety of condition. There must, it seems obvious, 
be some controlling power which sets and keeps the pattern, 
so that from a woodcock, for example, bought in a London 
poulterer’s, we can furnish a description which is sure to agree 
in every particular with the plumage of birds found in Lapland 
or in Japan; while in any of the multitude of dandelions which 
April scatters through the land will be found an exact counter- 
part, though not a facsimile, of its brethren in Greenland, Italy, 
or Patagonia. If such agreement is without a cause, does it not 
seem there must be an end of science? If, on the other hand, 
a cause there be, must it not resemble, at least analogically, that 
intelligence which of all powers known to us in the world can 
alone discern in the visible universe more than can be perceived 
by corporeal eyes, recognising as its ultimate explanation an 
infinite cause, for which, to us, the word Mind is the least 
inadequate and misleading of symbols ? + 
DISCUSSION. 
On the conclusion of the paper, the CHAIRMAN thanked the 
author, in the name of the meeting, for his interesting and all too 
brief lecture. It must be considered as a tremendous shock to the 
strict Linnean to find that there were people who believed in species 
* Familiar Lectures, “On Atoms.” 
t+ Mivart, Lessons from Nature, p. 301. 
