TRAHSACTIO>iS OF SECTION D. 729 



could agree as to liow a ' Species ' was constituted. It will be enough for me to say 

 now that Louis Agassiz pinned his faith on every ' Species ' heing not merely the 

 result of a single direct act of creation, hut, when he found that physical barriers 

 interposed (as they often do) between two or more parts of the area which the 

 ' Species ' occupied, he did not hesitate to declare tbat a ' Species ' might have 

 been created directly in several places, at sundry times, and even in vast numbers. 

 If the same Species of freshwater Fish, for instance, was found in several rivers 

 which bad no intercommunication, it had been, he asserted, separately created in 

 each. Before his time people bad been content to talk of each Species having had 

 a single birthplace — its own ' Centre of Creation ' — but he maintained that many 

 species must have had several Centres of Creation, and creation was in his mind no 

 figurative expression. He meant by it, just as Linnajus before him had meant, a 

 direct act of God ; in other words his belief was that there had been going on 

 around us a series of mj'sterious performances, not one of which bad e^er been 

 consciously witnessed by a human eye, but each of which had for its object the 

 independent formation of a new living being, animal or plant. That is to say that 

 there had been going on from time indefinite a continuous series of operations which 

 could only be termed miraculous, since there was no known natural law by means 

 of which they could be produced. Though the author of tbis theory was, in the 

 country of his adoption, regarded as the especial champion of opinions tbat are 

 commonly termed orthodox, it is not surprising that many minds revolted from 

 such a conclusion as it required — a conclusion which they not unfitly deemed a 

 reductio ad absia-dum. Yet the position of Professor Agassiz was perfectly logical 

 when once bis premisses were admitted ; and, more than that, it became obvious to 

 all clear-seeing men that one of these alternatives must be adopted — either Agassiz's 

 logical doctrine of Centres of Creation, or the theory of tbe Transmutation of 

 Species, which bad been so long condemned because no reasonable explanation of 

 its modus operandi was known. 



I have called these alternative opinions because I believe tbat no third course 

 had been suggested by any naturalist, and yet it is hard to say which of them was 

 most unpalatable to tbe world at large. On tbe one baud people were called upon 

 to believe tbat Man was in some inexplicable and unaccountable way produced 

 from a Monad. On the other hand they were called upon to believe tbat the 

 inhabitants, vegetable and animal, whether bestial or human, of nearly every 

 group of islands in the Pacific Ocean were the result of innumerable special acts of 

 Creation entirely performed within the limits of almost each cluster of coral reefs. 

 The natural consequence of this was that most people, and even most biologists, 

 remained in an apathetic if not an untliinking condition on tbis subject, and went 

 on as their fathers bad done, not caring to trouble themselves in this matter. It 

 was only a few — an extremely few — among them who ever gave tbe question 

 any consideration at all, and these few were not so much the men who had confined 

 their labours to museums, libraries, or laboratories, but they were, with scarcely an 

 exception, men who bad studied Nature in the field, and had seen her works under 

 varied aspects in tbe most distant and diverse climes. They were of the men who 

 had personally compared tbe geological formations of the Old World and the New, 

 men who bad circumnavigated tbe globe, who had surveyed Antarctic volcanoes 

 or Himalayan snows, who bad dredged the depths of Australian oceans or had 

 explored Amazonian forests. Out of the abundance of their observation and 

 reflection these men — to this audience I need not name them — in due time delivered 

 their verdict, and when it was delivered its effect was crushing. The position of 

 the supporters of the doctrine of ' Centres of Creation,' logical as it had seemed, 

 was swept away — not of course without a gallant struggle on the part of its 

 defenders — and the theory of the ' Transmutation of Species,' fanciful and un- 

 reasonable as it had been thought, was under a new name established, the very 

 fact of its success being an additional proof of, to use Mr. Herbert Spencer's happy 

 phrase, the ' Survival of the Fittest.' 



But perhaps some of you have been thinking or whispering to your neighbours, 

 ' Why should our president be taking up our time by making us listen to all 

 these platitudes, this old story with which we are all familiar ? ' and if you hays 



