148 Siouoo City Academy of Science and Letters. 



be essentially insoluble." We believe that from, this first 

 almost indeterminate form of life on our globe, so long 

 ago that we can have no comprehension of the meaning 

 of the words expressing the time, there were two diverg- 

 ing lines of development from which all forms of life, 

 plant or animal, which have since existed, have come. 

 Nature, working with unlimited means, through endless 

 time and space, had by ceaseless, but slow modification, 

 developed all organic beings, one from another. An un- 

 deviating, ever acting law of continuity has accomplished 

 all the wonderful works we see about us. 



If, as is believed by those who have spent a lifetime 

 in the study of this great and important question, life had 

 its beginning on this earth in its lowest and most simple 

 forms, in the way I have so briefly and inadequately 

 described, then there comes up the not less interesting 

 question, how have all the various forms of life, both 

 plant and animal, arisen that have since covered the land 

 and peopled the sea? The old ideas of the fixity and 

 immutability of species, created suddenly by supernat- 

 ural fiat, have largely disappeared from among intelli- 

 gent people everywhere. Near the close of the 1 8th cen- 

 tury, Goethe, in Germany, Erasmus Darwin, in England, 

 and Geoffrey St. Hilaire, in France, gave out their con- 

 clusions on this subject that were so far in advance of 

 the age they lived in that they found few believers. 

 From their study and observation, they came to the con- 

 clusions that species of all kinds were not, as had hither- 

 to been believed, immutable and unchangeable, but, on 

 the contrary, they were continually changing. Before 

 their time, and even to the present, a belief in the in- 

 fallibility of the story of creation as told in Genesis has 

 prevented many from even attempting to find any differ- 

 ent way of accounting for the innumerable forms of life 

 which have existed since life began, than that set forth 

 in the supposed inspired account of special creation. 

 But the accumulating mass of facts gained by the patient 

 investigations of scientists in all parts of the earth has 

 led to an ever-growing belief that all the different species 

 of plants and animals have descended and been formed 

 from earlier ones by modification. It may be set down 



