REY. JOHN GERARD, F.L.S., ON SPECIES AND THEIR ORIGIN. 139 
species individuals which really ought more properly to be termed 
varieties, while others limited species to those individuals which 
were essentially distinct from all others, the whole question 
hingeing upon what is the true definition of a species. 
One speaker had alluded to the theory of “ mutations,” or sudden 
modifications in plants or animals, as the starting point for further 
evolution, or for the origin of new species, but Mr. Sutton contended 
that there was no instance on record of any such “ mutation” having 
produced a new species, and that the “ mutations ” of which so much 
had been heard, were really nothing more than variations which are 
so common and which occur so constantly when different varieties 
of any one species are cross-fertilized. 
Dr. SCHOFIELD.—I have listened with great interest to the paper 
just read and it seems to me that the very existence of Science 
postulates mind, for it is all a quest for laws or orderly and rational 
sequences which require mind to produce them, The most 
remarkable thing is the facility with which some scientists can turn 
the blind eye when they wish. For instance, they wander along an 
old river bed and pick up a flint evidently chipped purposely to 
sharpen it, and they called it an arrow-head and see in that flint 
the unmistakable impress of mind beneath. They are quite clear 
that it must require mind to make the chips on a flint that have an 
obvious purpose in view. The funny thing is that when they leave 
the flint and consider the philosopher who discovered it, the blind 
eye is turned and they see no necessity for the intervention of mind. 
He forsooth is a somewhat fortuitous concourse of atoms, the 
product of a mysterious and wholly imaginary force called evolution 
that by “sexual selection” and the “survival of the fittest” has 
succeeded in forming him. In short it took a great mind to design 
St. Paul’s Cathedral—no one doubts this—but Sir Christopher 
Wren himself was a chance product of a blind evolution. To make 
these chips on an arrow-head requires mind, but no mind is needed to 
make a philosopher. How Wisdom rises above folly in the words, 
“Every house is builded by some man; but He that built all things 
is God!” 
The SECRETARY desired, as one of the least of the followers of 
Darwin, to be allowed to protest against the manner in which the 
opinions of evolutionists were so often travestied. He trusted that 
none of them wouid ever meet in the flesh the sort of evolutionist 
