Auckland Institute. 447 



investigations which he had been for many years engaged in making on the 

 subject, and which were not then complete. 



Mr. Walhice has raised weighty objections* wliich seem to suggest a 

 further expansion of the theory so as to make it embrace some occasional and 

 apparently violent or, at all events, sudden changes which would appear at 

 first sight to be interferences with the course of law or to be "catastrophic," 

 but which Professor Huxley has demonstrated may, though only occurring at 

 intervals, be as much a part of the uniform law as those which recur rapidly. 



Such difficulties and answers to them, more or less complete, are now 

 agitating thinkers in every line of science ; for it is the striking character of 

 these discussions, and a noble result of Mr. Darwin's theory, that at last, after 

 long pursuing divergent lines of investigation, all sciences are now meeting in 

 front of this great question of the origin and development of life ; the 

 biologists and microscopists ardently disputing the possibility of its generation 

 from inorganic matter ; the anatomists investigating the mysterious functions 

 of the brain and the curious facts of embryology ; the palfsontologist, the 

 geologist and the botanist tracing up forms of life to the primitive type, and 

 physiologists in common with metaphysicians labouring to the same end, 

 seeking to obtain some notion of the action of will, mind, or spirit upon 

 matter, or to ascertain if there be any real distinction between them. 

 Astronomy and meteorology too have been brought to bear on the question, 

 especially in the curious meteoric hypothesis suggested by Sir William 

 Thomson, and Mr St. George Mivart's book affords a curious proof that this 

 universal stirring of the mind has reached even to these tranquil regions of 

 thought in which labours of the great scholastic philosophers of the middle 

 ages and of the casuists who followed them usually repose. 



I do not like leaving the subject without some reference to the reactions 



to which by an inevitable law of nature the great advances in thought made 



in our day have given rise; every sudden outburst of new light has produced a 



darkening effect in some quarters ; and the eras of advance in the world have 



ever been marked by the wildest outbreaks of ignorance and superstition. A 



poet of the end of the last century says, — 



"As Phoebus to the world, is science to the soul, 

 And reason now through number, time, and space 

 Darts the keen lustre of her serious eye." 



And he then proceeds to rejoice in the victory he supposes to be gained over 

 superstition. 



The triumph was premature ; the advance in science indeed, since Beattie's 

 day, has been far greater than he could have foreseen, but credulity has not 

 diminished but has only shifted its ground, and seems rather to increase with 



•Wallace's "Natural Selection," pp. 332-342. 



