120 THE PRESIDENTS ADDRESS. 
gainer by this widening of the scientific horizon. In 1857 our 
greatest English naturalist, Prof. Owen, set forth his remarkable new 
system of classification of mammals, based on the form and complex- 
ity of the brain. In this novel and ingenious system he separates 
man, on clearly defined grounds of cerebral structure and propor- 
tions, into a distinct and crowning order of ARCHENCEPHALA ; there- 
by supplying by anticipation, a scientific antidote to one at least of 
the fallacies of Professor Powell, which may be thus stated: regard- 
ing the duration of time and the number of species as equally 
unlimited, he argues :—‘ While the number of species thus tends to 
become infinitely great, the extreme difference between man at one 
end and a zoophyte at the other end of the scale is constantly finite ; 
hence the average difference between any two species tends to become 
infinitely small; multiplied by the number of species, it must still be 
equal to a finite quantity ; and tne product being finite, if the first 
factor be infinity the second must be zero.”’ 
It is scarcely necessary to observe that the tendency of species to 
an infinite multiplication of intermediate links, which is implied here, 
is a perfectly gratuitous assumption. The duration of time and the 
multiplication of species may be equally infinite ; that it will be so 
we assuredly have no right to assume; but in that case the analogies 
which paleontology reveals do not suggest the idea that such pro- 
longed manifestations of the Creator’s power to produce an infinite 
series of new forms will be exercised intermediately between those 
two fixed. points of zoophyte and man. What if creative power 
should go on beyond the latter, into still higher manifestations of the 
divine image? Man cannot be demonstrated to be an absolute 
finality in organic creation. Apart, however, from any question of 
future creations, we look in vain among organic fossils for any such 
gradations of form as even to suggest a process of transmutation. 
Above all, in relation to man, no fossil form adds a single link to fill 
up the wide interval between him and the most anthropoid of inferior 
animals, when viewing him purely in those salient physical aspects 
to which the observation of the paleontologist is limited. The 
Archencephale of Owen stands as the crowning masterpiece of 
organic creation, separated from the highest type of inferior animal 
organization by as well defined and broad a line of demarkation as 
an insular kingdom from the states, republics, and confederacies of a 
neighbouring continent; and if the difference between man and the 
