116 THE PRESIDENTS ADDRESS. 
delight which springs from the discovery of its secret truths; that 
we climb the steeps of knowledge, as the traveller ascends the moun- 
tain’s unexplored cliffs, gladdened at every pause in his ascent with 
new grandeur and beauty in the widening horizon which opens on 
his delighted gaze. 
But, while in thus leaving out of our present consideration the 
direct commercial and utilitarian results of Canadian science, our 
chief field of operation in Canada, and the immediate evidences of her 
scientific progress, are presented to us in the illustration of unknown 
gasteropods, crinoids, and foraminifera, discovered among the fossil 
forms of our older paleeozoic rocks: we must not overlook the com- 
prehensive generalizations to which the accumulation of such minute 
and seemingly isolated facts in ancient organic structure are leading. 
With the original area of observation so immensely widened to the 
zoologist and naturalist by the comprehensive disclosures of paleology, 
all former conciusions are being subjected to revision and testing by 
such new evidence. The reality of the existence of very clearly 
discriminated specific forms, and the proofs of a continuous system 
of organization, development, displacement, and extinction, seem all 
more evident and indisputable. Yet the immediate result appears in 
the removal of many old land-marks of scientific faith, whereby we 
witness some of those conditions of ruin, which mark all transitional 
and revolutionary eras,—whether of thought or action. The old has 
been shaken, or thrown down, the new is still to build ; and the casual 
and hasty observer is too apt to regard the indispensable clearing 
away of old and worn-out fabrics as the index only of ruin and desola- 
tion ; while in reality it is the mevitable stage towards a higher re- 
placement: like the ragged log-piles, the girdled-trees, and charred 
stumps of the pioneers of civilization in our Canadian wilderness, 
which are the needful precursors of the clearing, the farm-house, and 
the happy village homes. 
In this light, I conceive, we must look upon that comprehensive 
question which now challenges revision in the hearing of new wit- 
nesses: What is Species? It is a question which forces us back to 
first principles, and equally affects the sciences of Paleontology, 
Zoology, and Ethnology; while it has also been made to bear in no 
unimportant degree on the relations of Science aud Theology: in- 
volving as it does the questions :—In what forms has creative power 
been manifested in the succession of orgaaic life? and, Under what 
