116 THE PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 
world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determin- 
ing the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings 
not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few 
beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was 
deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.’’ But apart from 
what I cannot avoid characterizing as the monstrous notion that any 
new system of psychology can account for the origin of the intellect 
and living soul of man by development: the question is not whether 
man in reality acquires a scientific patent of nobility by tracing his 
ancestry back, through the Gorilla or the Chimpanse, to some vital 
monad that had its being ages before the first bed of the Silurian 
system was deposited; but whether science affords the slightest 
countenance to such a pedigree. If the origin of species be really 
traceable to natural selection and the preservation of favoured races in 
the struggle for life, then it should be demonstrable that man is pre- 
eminently favoured in physical organization, for he has every where 
triumphed over all other animals. But that triumph has been the 
result of no such physical preeminence, but of that intellectual power 
bestowed on him when—as we believe on an authority to which the 
progress of science adds ever fresh confirmation,—God breathed into 
him the breath of life, and man became a living soul. 
In defining the contrasting gifts of instinct and reason which dis- 
tinguish the lower animals from man, it was remarked by one whose 
death has robbed life to me of one of its greatest charms,—one, let me 
add, who found his earnest faith im things divine confirmed by every 
step he advanced in scientific knowledge :—‘ Our working instincts are 
very few; our faith in them is still more feeble; and our physical 
wants far greater than those of any other creature. Had the assem- 
bled lower animals been invited to pronounce upon what medical men 
call the ‘viability,’ or managers of insurance offices ‘the chances of 
life’ of the first human infant, their verdict would have been swift, 
perhaps compassionate, but certainly inexorable. The poor little 
featherless biped, pitied by the downy gosling, and despised by the 
plumed eaglet, would have been consigned to the early grave, which 
so plainly in appearance awaited him; and no mighty Nimrod, with 
endless lion-slaying hunter-sons, would have been seen to dawn in long 
perspective above the horizon, and claim the fragile infant as their 
stalwart father. Yet the heritage of nakedness, which no animal 
envies us, is not more the memorial of the innocence that once was 
