382 Canadian Record of Science 



an agreement between themselves that they should main- 

 tain the mathematical relationship which, we observe, 

 exists? We should be as fully justified in endowing 

 them with a conscious personality, as Darwin was in as- 

 cribing to plants self-determination of their career, when 

 • he spoke of "Natural Selection." 



So, too, the word ' ' time ' ' is made to play a large part 

 in Darwin's theory. But here again the term is only an 

 abstraction, signifying the succession of events and 

 things, but not a force or agent. Yet Darwin speaks of 

 300,000,000 of years as able to yield all the diverse and 

 complicated phenomena of life as it now exists and as it 

 has existed in the several areas of which the rocks bear 

 the records, all proceeding from a single protoplasmic 

 cell. When he explains himself, he indeed tells us that 

 he means that little changes in succeeding generations 

 might, when put together in so prodigious a period, result" 

 in the great multitude of varied living things. Lord 

 Kelvin, however, as great an authority in Physics as Dar- 

 win was in Natural History, and who has studied with 

 care the facts adduced by Darwin in support of his 

 theory, without being convinced by them, declared that 

 the globe cannot possibly be more than 20,000,000 years 

 old. This conclusion he arrived at by calculating how 

 long it must have taken the earth to have cooled to its 

 present condition from its primeval molten state. Be 

 that as it may, it is enough to say that if changes, even 

 the slightest, have not been observed looking to the for- 

 mation of new species since men began to take cognizance 

 of life as it now is on our planet, the mere multiplying of 

 eras cannot be supposed to secure results. The multi- 

 plying of nothing by infinity would still yield nothing. 



It was one of Darwin's theories that the varieties 

 which are ever and anon appearing among the ordinary 

 forms of species might have a better chance, those of 

 them that the surroundings favoured, than the typical 

 specimens, and thus new species might be gradually 

 formed. But since he thus speculated, the good monk, 



