THE PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 113 
of it; but the term Zawrentian having been already applied to rocks 
of this age in North America by our distinguished associate, Sir Wm. 
Logan, I adhere to that name, the more so as as it is derived from a 
very extensive region of a great British Colony.” 
Thus geology is pointing with accumulating proofs to the beginnings 
of terrestrial life; while we are reminded by familiar evidence around 
us in many of the Canadian rocks, that at the commencement of 
those fossil records im the Laurentian strata, trilobites, and other 
crustacea abound ; and we are now assured, by the most recent dis- 
closures of science, that the bed of the present ocean is the arena of 
many inferior forms of organic life. Here therefore the accumulating 
evidence seems to force upon us the adoption, or rather the firmer re- 
tention, of opinions altogether at variance with those novel views on 
the nature and origin of species, to which I had occasion to refer 
when last addressing you from this Chair. But the questions in 
relation to the origin of species, which were then beginning to attract 
the attention of men of science, have during the past year excited a 
more general interest than any other purely scientific inquiry. 
When the views of DeMaillet, Oken, and Lamarck were reproduced 
in a popular form, it was not altogether without reason that the 
argument was affirmed to place science in conflict with religion. It 
seemed like an attempt, if not to dispense entirely with a supreme 
creative power and divine first cause, at least to reduce to the smallest 
conceivable minimum the controlling government of an ever-present, 
overruling providence ; and to demonstrate a universe which having 
been constructed like some ingenious piece of mechanism, wound up, 
and set agoing, was thenceforth capable of working out its results 
without further oversight, until the term of its mechanical forces was 
exhausted, and the finger, stopping of itself on the great dial, declared 
that time shall be no more. The theories of spontaneous generation 
and the modification of organized beings by external physical agents, 
or by the direct operation of their own voluntary acts, have indeed 
found advovates among those honestly in search of guiding lights 
towards the hidden laws and truths of nature ; but they have main- 
tained but a feeble hold on the earnest students of science, and have 
for the most part been diluted into popular forms of scepticism in 
which all recognition of a providential government of the universe 
has beenignored. But the novel and highly suggestive views on the 
origin of species by means of natural selection, are presented to us 
