122 THE PRESIDENTS ADDRESS. 
zoological science ; illuminating, as it does, our knowledge of existing 
orders by the deeper insight acquired into forms of organic life that 
have long been extinct, it is a collateral contribution to scientific 
‘truth, analogous in kind, though not in degree, to that comprehensive 
‘demonstration of the typical skeleton, by which it is traced in all its 
details, from the highest to the lowest vertebrate forms. Such grand 
‘generalizations, based, not on theory, but on laborious and exhaustive 
induction, reveal to us the plan of the Creator, wrought out in His 
unchangeable purpose, through ail the countless ages during which 
our planet has been the theatre of life. They tell us, moreover, in 
unmistakeable language, that even to work out one single idea of the 
Divine mind, it has required the unmeasurable duration of time since 
that initial act in which God said let there be light, and called into 
being this well-ordered material world. “lo these are parts of his 
ways; but how little a portion is heard of him; but the thunder of 
his power who can understand ?”’ 
In the fossil radiata and mollusca of our Canadian paleozoic form- 
‘ations, illustrated and described in the recently published Decades of 
our Geological Survey, we are aided in the investigation of life as it 
existed in that primary geological period in which the earliest traces 
of organic form appear ; but an altogether different interest has been 
recently excited by discoveries at the very opposite end of the geolo- 
gical scale. It is nownearly ten years since M. Boucher de Perthes 
announced the discovery of the traces of human art in the same 
undisturbed gravel of the north of France, in which the bones of the 
fossil elephant and other extinct mammals are found. More recently 
fresh discoveries have tended to show that the statements set forth 
in the ‘‘ Antiquités Celtiques et Antediluviennes’’ merited greater 
attention than, on various accounts, they received ; and the testimony 
of Mr. Prestwick, Sir Charles Lyell, and other thoroughly trust- 
worthy observers appears to place the fact beyond all controversy 
that artificially wrought weapons and implements of flint have been 
found both in France and England, in such contiguity with the 
extinct fossil mammals of the drift, as to leave little room for ques- 
tion that at a period long anterior to the earliest indications of history 
or tradition, the north of Europe was occupied by a human popula- 
¢ion in a condition not less rude than the Indian aborigines of our 
own American Forests. 
Purposing as I do, to take up the comprehensive inquiries to which 
