ADDRESS. Ixxxili 
It is hardly necessary to inform you that since his time the domain of the 
naturalist has been immensely extended—the whole science of geology, with 
its astounding revelations regarding the life of the ancient earth, having been 
created. The rigidity of old conceptions has been relaxed, the public mind 
being rendered gradually tolerant of the idea that not for six thousand, nor 
for sixty thousand, nor for six thousand thousand thousand, but for wons em- 
bracing untold millions of years, this earth has been the theatre of life and 
death. The riddle of the rocks has been read by the geologist and paleon- 
tologist, from subcambrian depths to the deposits thickening over the sea- 
bottoms of to-day. And upon the leaves of that stone book are, as you know, 
stamped the characters, plainer and surer than those formed by the ink of 
history, which carry the mind back into abysses of past time compared with 
which the periods which satisfied Bishop Butler cease to have a visual angle. 
The lode of discovery once struck, those petrified forms in which hfe was at 
one time active, increased to multitudes and demanded classification. They 
were grouped in genera, species, and varieties, according to the degree of 
similarity subsisting between them. ‘Thus confusion was avoided, each 
~ object being found in the pigeon-hole appropriated to it and to its fellows of 
similar morphological or physiological character. The general fact soon 
became eyident that none but the simplest forms of life lie lowest down, that 
as we climb higher among the superimposed strata more perfect forms 
appear. The change, however, from form to form was not continuous, but 
by steps—some small, some great. <A section,” says Mr. Huxley, “a 
hundred fect thick will exhibit at different heights a dozen species of Am- 
monite, none of which passes beyond its particular zone of limestone, or clay, 
into the zone below it, or into that above it.” In the presence of such facts 
it was not possible to avoid the question:—Have these forms, showing, 
though in broken stages and with many irregularities, this unmistakable 
general adyance, been subjected to no continuous law of growth or variation ? 
Had our education been purely scientific, or had it been sufficiently de- 
tached from influences which, however ennobling in another domain, have 
always proved hindrances and delusions when introduced as factors into 
the domain of physics, the scientific mind never could have swerved from the 
search for a law of growth, or allowed itself to accept the anthropomorphism 
which regarded each successive stratum as a kind of mechanic’s bench for 
the manufacture of new species out of all relation to the old.’ 
Biased, however, by their previous education, the great majority of 
naturalists invoked a special creative act to account for the appearance 
of each new group of organisms. Doubtless there were numbers who 
were clear-headed enough to sce that this was no explanation at all, that 
in point of fact it was an attempt, by. the introduction of a greater 
difficulty, to account for a less. But having nothing to offer in the 
way of explanation, they for the most part held their peace. Still the 
thoughts of reflecting men naturally and necessarily simmered round the 
question. De Maillet, a contemporary of Newton, has been brought into 
notice by Professor Huxley as one who “had a notion of the modifiability of 
living forms,’ In my frequent conversations with him, the late Sir Ben- 
jamin Brodie, a man of highly philosophic mind, often drew my atten- 
tion to the fact that, as early as 1794, Charles Darwin’s grandfather was the 
pioneer of Charles Darwin*. In 1801, and in subsequent years, the cele- 
brated Lamarck, who produced so profound an impression on the public mind 
* Zoonomia, yol, i, pp. 500-510. 
f2 
