506TH ORDINARY GENERAL MEETING. 
MONDAY, APRIL 41x, 1910. 
LiEuT.-Co.. G. MACKINLAY IN THE CHAIR. 
The Minutes of the preceding Meeting were read and confirmed. 
The following election was announced :— 
Associate : Colonel H. G. MacGregor, C.B. 
The following paper was then read by the Author :— 
DARWINISM AND MALTHUS. 
By the Rev. JAMES WuirE, M.A. 
MONG the many centenaries that marked the year 1909, 
none have equalled either in interest or importance that 
of Darwin. His discovery of the laws of evolution and survival 
of the fittest, explaining the origin of species and the develop- 
ment of life’s various forms, has been the most important and 
wide-reaching since Newton established the law of gravitation. 
And although we cannot be sure that the principles discovered 
and elaborated by Darwin and by Wallace, are as far-reaching 
throughout the material universe, as the law that matter 
attracts matter directly as the mass, and inversely as the 
square of the distance, yet the idea of evolution, development, 
and the struggle in life, have affected more fields of thought, 
and have more varied applications, than that great law which 
governs only the relations of inanimate matter. Our ideas on 
morals, religion, social relations, in almost everything that 
concerns human life, have been influenced, and frequently very 
largely modified by the principles for whose discovery and 
exposition we are indebted to Darwin and to Wallace ; and 
their application to animal life have not only been illuminating 
but transforming. 
