Prof. J. Phillips's Inaugural Address. 461 
relation in the highest degree, there seems to be a line which cir- 
cumscribes each group, within which variations occur, from food, 
exercise, climate, and transmitted peculiarities. Often one specific 
group approaches another, or several others, and a question arises 
whether, though now distinct, or rather distinguishable, they always 
have been so from their beginning, or will be always so until their 
disappearance. 
Whether what we call species are so many original creations or 
derivations from a few types or one type, is discussed at length in 
the elegant treatise of Darwin,* himself a naturalist of eminent 
rank. It had been often discussed before. Nor will anyone think 
lightly of such inquiries, who remembers the essay of Linnzus, 
‘De Telluris orbis incremento,’ or the investigations of Brown, 
Prichard, Forbes, Agassiz, and Hooker, regarding the local origin of 
» different species, genera, and families of plants and animals, both on 
the land and in the sea. Still less will he be disposed to undervalue 
its importance, when he reflects on the many successive races of 
living forms more or less resembling our existing quadrupeds, 
reptiles, fishes, and mollusca, which appear to have occupied definite 
and different parts of the depths of ancient time ; as now the tiger 
and the jaguar, the cayman, and the gavial, live on different parts of 
the terrestrial surface. Is the living elephant of Ceylon the lineal 
descendant of that mammoth which roamed over Siberia and 
Europe, and North America; or of one of those sub- Himalayan 
tribes which Dr. Falconer has made known; or was it a species 
dwelling only in cireumpolar regions ? Can our domestic cattle, 
horses and dogs, our beasts of chase and our beasts of prey, be 
traced back to their source in older types, contemporaries of the 
urus, megaceros, and hyzna on the plains of Europe? If so, what 
range of variation in structure does it indicate? If not so, by what 
characters are the living races separated from those of earlier date ? 
Specific questions of this kind must be answered, before the 
general proposition, that the forms of life are indefinitely variable 
with time and circumstance, can be even examined by the light of 
adequate evidence. ‘That such evidence will be gathered and rightly 
interpreted, I for one neither doubt nor fear ; nor will any be too 
hasty in adopting extreme opinions, or too fearful of the final result, 
who remember how often that which is true has been found very 
different from that which was plausible, and how often out of the 
nettles of danger we have plucked the flowers of safety. At the 
present moment the three propositions which were ever present to 
the mind of Edward Forbes may be successfully maintained, as 
agreeing with many observed phznomena ; and around them as a 
basis of classification may be gathered most of the facts and most of 
the speculations which relate to the history of life.t First, it may 
* On the Origin of Species, 1859. 
t+ See the remarkable Essay of E. Forbes on the distribution of the existing 
Fauna and Flora of the British Isles, in Memoirs of Geol. Survey of Britain, vol. i. 
p. 336. 
