IN EVOLUTION FROM A GEOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW. 187 
Professor OrcHarnp.—With your permission I would make three 
or four rather brief observations upon this paper, with the value 
of which and its logical character I think none of us have failed 
to be impressed. 
That the case for ‘‘ extreme evolution ” is absolutely disproved 
no one can doubt; but I think the paper goes rather further than 
that. If we look at page 8, and read of these parallel lines which 
when we go back as far 
b] 
meet at infinity, and do not meet in time 
as evidence warrants our going back; and if, as we extend them 
through the supposed millions of years, they still do not meet; the 
fact that they do not meet appears to me to be conclusive that 
evolution does not exist. 
There is another important argument, and that is the argument 
of reversion. If you endeavour to overstep, by artificial means — 
by constraint which nature does not herself employ—the bound- 
aries of species, directly you leave the creatures to themselves they 
revert to their original types,as we know. Now this shows a force 
opposed to evolution. Why this reversion back to original form, 
if the great force or power in nature is always toward alteration ? 
It appears to me to be altogether inconsistent with any form 
whatever of the doctrine of evolution. I might follow the lecturer 
on the fact that evolutionists can show no connecting links; with 
regard to which you may remember the words of the great 
American (Dana) that if those links ever existed their dis- 
appearance without trace is altogether inexplicable. That is a 
strong argument; but I think the argument as to reversion is 
even stronger still. 
With regard to extreme evolution, some might think that 
Herbert Spencer’s evolution was more extreme than that of 
Haecke]. Herbert Spencer, as we are aware, does not stop at 
living forms, but goes back to inanimate matter, which he 
imagines to have been homogenesis, and acted upon by a force 
of some mechanical nature—this theory is more extreme and 
absurd than even Haeckel’s, but perhaps they are first cousins to 
each other. 
I am glad that the lecturer had the courage to speak of divine 
power and design. If the Creator, as we believe, of various forms 
of life, made them with certain similar functions to fulfil and with 
certain environments, more or less similar, is it any wonder that 
there should be a remarkable structural resemblance ? 
