TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 



133 



species adapted te the circumstances of their environments. In corcl'-ision, the 

 author considered that although the discoveiy of the law of natural selection 

 marked an era in the history of natural science, and gave a wonderful impulse lo 

 original research, the danger now is that the law will be pressed into services 

 which have no claim upon it, and that iu the hands of injudicious partisans it will 

 become a hindrance rather than an aid to science, by closing the door against 

 fm-ther investigations into other laws which lie behind it. 



On Protoijlasm and the Germ Theories. By Gilbeet W. Child, M.A., F.L.S. 

 After an examination of the various germ theories which had been put forward, 

 the author said it appeared to him that abiogenesis in some form or another was a 

 necessary consequence of certain other theories which were gaining groimd at the 

 present moment, by the Darwinian hypothesis and the theory of evolution. It 

 was hardly conceivable that we could theoretically hold that the original simple 

 forms from which the whole animal and vegetable world had been developed, had 

 sprung into existence out of the regvdar order of the evolution of the universe. What 

 was called the germ theory of disease threw an interesting light on the question. 

 Zymotic diseases were now generally believed to result from the multiplication and 

 reproduction of germs in the blood of the man or animal affected. The matter to 

 be accounted for was how the disease-germ appeared, disappeared, and afterwards 

 again cropped up in the same district at great intervals of time. If the old theories 

 were to be maintained in their entirety as to the fixity of species, every one of 

 these diseases must have existed somewhere from the begimiing. That was a view 

 which was hardly credible, but it was held nevertheless. On the other hand, the 

 hypothesis of the evolution of these germs de novo, by abiogenesis, would 

 account for such phenomena in an intelligible manner. In conclusion, the writer 

 was far from thinking that abiogenesis is proved to take place at the present 

 time. His own experiments, published in the ' Proceedings of the Royal Society,' 

 I860, did not pretend to prove this. It is quite possible, and indeed probable, 

 that the small moving masses of protoplasm found by Dr. Beale and himself in 

 his experimental vessels might, as suggested by the President in his Address, have 

 resisted the boiling temperature to which the contents of those vessels had been 

 subjected. If this were so, it no doubt nullified the evidence of those experinients 

 so far as they tended towards the solution of the main question at issue ; but if so, 

 it equally nullified the evidence of M. Pastem-'s researches, on which the opponents 

 of the doctrine of abiogenesis rested their case. The latter were therefore re- 

 duced to this dilemma, either these minute organisms which were found in the 

 experiments of the writer and others can withstand the boiling temperature, or 

 they cannot. In the former case, there is no evidence left on either side ; in the 

 latter they must have been produced by abiogenesis. 



On some of the more Im])ortant Facts of Sitccession in Relation to any Theory 

 of Continuity. By Dr. Cobbold, F.B.S., F.L.S. 



The author remarked that for several years past the Biological Section had per- 

 mitted, if it had not actually encouraged, the reading of papers on the theory of 

 natural selection. The facts he had here selected for exposition were such as 

 represented what might be termed the apparent chronology of the organic series, 

 or, in other words, the ascertained times of the coming and flourishing of the larger 

 animal gToups. A true conception of what was or ought to be understood by the 

 expression " equivalencies " — botanical, zoological, or geological — lay at the basis 

 of a correct appreciation of the sig-nificance of the records of animal, vegetable, or 

 sedimentary rock distribution throughout all time. Further, he ventured to assert 

 that the gi'andeur of the formative scheme of Nature, whether testifjing to an 

 evolutionary method of production or to a series of creative acts, few or many in 

 number, could only be adequately realized by the naturalist whose powers of allo- 

 cation and gi'ouping enabled him to grasp the import of those relations. He then 



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