222 WALTER KIDD, M.D.^ F.Z.S., ON 



The Chairman. — I have listeDed to this paper with great 

 interest, and it seems to me one of the ablest essays in support of 

 the doctrine of Design in Nature I have ever read. I need 

 scarcely say that in the main I am entirely in accord witli 

 Di\ Kidd's arguments and conclusions. I am one of those who 

 think that if the followers of Mr. Herbert Spencer, and others who 

 deny the doctrine of Design, experience difficulty in understanding 

 the reasoning of the teleologist, the latter must have greater 

 difficulty in understanding the reasoning of his opponent ; because 

 the teleologist is every day accustomed to observe the relations of 

 cause and effect, of design and designer, in all the ordinary affairs 

 of life ; and can point to analogy in the history of the Cosmos 

 which his opponent ignoi'es ; or has to try and explain away by 

 invoking the aid of what the author calls " the gods of tlie 

 evolutionary pantheon," of whose actions, after all, he can know 

 very little, and has to guess very much. 



Dr. Kidd has very ably endeavoured to synchronise the process 

 of development of living beings on this earth with the geological 

 changes in the physical phenomena which the science of geology 

 has unfolded to us in recent years. I do not feel able to go quite 

 so far in this direction as the learned author in regard to the 

 adaptation of the physical conditions to the animal and plant life ; 

 because I do not believe that ever since early Cambrian or 

 Silurian times, the globe was in a condition in which it could not, 

 at one part of its surface or another, have supported the plants 

 and animals of the present day, including man himself. Gene- 

 rally speaking I quite admit a gradual process of preparedness 

 as time went on, and in my work on The Goal-fields of Great 

 Britain (4 Edit. p. 71), I use the ai'gament of design in 

 reference to the storage of the strata with the vast supplies of 

 mineral fuel. It seems to me, however, that the Creator having 

 endowed physical matter with laws, left these laws to woi'k out 

 their own results without special interference with their operation. 

 For example, though we can observe the admirable manner in 

 which, the distribution of land and water, or of continent and ocean, 

 acted upon by the sun's heat and directed by the rotation of the 

 earth on its axis, serve to set in motion the great oceanic currents 

 by which the warm waters of the equatorial regions are carried 

 into the arctic and antarctic regions, and thus serve to equalize to 

 a great degree the climates, I am unable to go so far as to say 

 how this general arrangement of continent and ocean has been 

 brought about. But when we come to deal with organised beings, 



