or 
DARWINISM AND MALTHUS. 235 
the Physiological Section of the British Association at Winnipeg 
last year. Far more helpful, because written in the light of a 
broader perspective of facts, is the Address at the same meeting of 
the President of the Geological Section.* “Dr. Smith-Woodward 
discusses at some length (with a marvellous wealth of facts, which 
paleontological research has brought to light in recent years both 
in the Old World and in the New) the dual tendency (i) of changes 
towards advancement and fixity as determinate in one direction ; and 
(il) of changes towards eatinction (which are so commonly repeated), 
as denoting some inherent property in living things, which is as 
definite as that of crystallization in inorganic substances. All this 
surely implies ‘‘directivity.” It is compatible with the doctrine of 
evolution with its limitations, but it carries us far away from the 
doctrine of “blind chance or blank fortuity.” 
Dr. Woodward recognizes a “persistent progress of life to a 
higher plane, which we observe during the succession of geological 
periods.” But this had its checks, as with arrested development of 
the cerebral function the more animal functions, with favourable 
environmental conditions, expended their energy in the production 
of a “superfluity of dead matter.” As examples of this we may 
point to the megatherium, the mammoth, the glyptodon, the 
dinornis, storing up useless encumbrances of osseous mineral 
matter. We see the same principle illustrated in the Orders 
Ammonitidae and Belemnitidae among Invertebrates ; both ending off 
bluntly at the close of the Mesozoic age, while the former shows a 
repetition of this tendency to produce asuperfluity of dead (mineral) 
matter. Here one minor evolution seems to have run its course 
parallel with the straight, chambered shells of the Nwu/ilide through 
later Palzeozoic time, to come to an abrupt regional termination 
with the disappearance of the magnificent Ammonites of the Alpine 
Trias, which may be seen in the Vienna Museum. In other regions 
a similar process of evolution seems to have begun at the incoming 
of the Jurassic series, to culminate in extinction at the end of the 
Mesozoic period. Space does not permit further quotations from 
Dr. Smith-Woodward’s remarkably illuminating paper, or his 
enumeration of ‘ strange cases of the rapid disappearance of whole 
* Address to Section C (Geology) by A. Smith-Woodward, LL.D. 
F.R.S., Keeper of the Geological Department, British Museum (Nat. His.), 
South Kensington. 
