ADDRESS. 29 



characters which are of no use, and indeed detrimental to the individual 

 may be hex'editarily transmitted from parents to offspring through a suc- 

 cession of generations. 



Since the conception of the possibility of the evolution of new species 

 from pre-existing forms took possession of the minds of naturalists, 

 attempts have been made to trace out the lines on which it has proceeded. 

 The first to give a systematic account of what he conceived to be the order 

 of succession in the evolution of animals was Ernst Haeckel, of Jena, in 

 a well-known treatise. Memoirs on special departments of the subject, 

 too numerous to particularise, have subsequently appeared. The problem 

 has been attacked along two different lines : the one by embryologists, 

 of whom may be named Kowalewsky, Gegenbaur, Dohrn, Ray Lankester, 

 Balfour, and Gaskell, who with many others have conducted careful and 

 methodical inquiries into the stages of development of numerous forms 

 belonging to the two great divisions of the animal kingdom. Inverte- 

 brates, as well as vertebrates, have been carefully compared with each 

 other in the bearing of their development and structure on their affinities 

 and descent, and the possible sequence in the evolution of the Vertebrata 

 from the Invertebrata has been discussed. The other method pursued by 

 palaeontologists, of whom Huxley, Marsh, Cope, Osborne, and Traquair 

 are prominent authorities, has been the study of the extinct forms pre- 

 served in the rocks and the comparison of their structure with each other 

 and with that of existing organisms. In the attempts to trace the line of 

 descent the imagination has not unf requently been called into play in con- 

 structing various conflicting hypotheses. Though from the nature of thin^^s 

 the order of descent is, and without doubt will continue to be, ever a matter 

 of speculation and inference and not of demonstration, the study of the 

 subject has been a valuable intellectual exercise and a powerful stimulant 

 to research. 



We know not as regards time when the fiat went forth, ' Let there be 

 Life, and there was Life.' All we can say is that it must have been in 

 the far-distant past, at a period so remote from the present that the mind 

 fails to grasp the duration of the interval. Pi'ior to its genesis our earth 

 consisted of barren rock and desolate ocean. When matter became 

 endowed with Life, with the capacity of self-maintenance and of 

 resisting external disintegrating forces, the face of nature began to 

 undergo a momentous change. Living organisms multiplied, the land 

 became covered with vegetation, and multitudinous varieties of plants, 

 from the humble fungus and moss to the stately palm and oak, beautified 

 its surface and fitted it to sustain higher kinds of living beings. Animal 

 forms appeared, in the first instance simple in structure, to be followed by 

 others more complex, until the mammalian type was produced. The 

 ocean also became peopled with plant and animal organisms, from the 

 microscopic diatom to the huge leviathan. Plants and animals acted and 



