20 Transactions. — MisceUaveous. 



call spirit disapx^ears witli the dissolution of the individual material com- 

 bination," as another of the teachers who have risen up amongst us puts it, 

 content to believe himself a mere accidental aggregation of particles of 

 carbonic acid, water, and ammonia, possessing nothing the lowest animal 

 does not share, having no future its progeny may not attain to, he treats 

 with scorn those who attribute the wonders of creation to " the vmch talkecl- 

 of purpose in nature,'' to their having been, as he expresses it, " invented and 

 constructed for his amusement by an ingenious t'r^a^or," whereas they have " in 

 reality arisen from^ the aimless action of natural selection.''' 



Whilst propounding his views about the narrow zone to which those 

 creatures wise enough to object to being frozen withdrew, he appears to have 

 forgotten the postulate mth which he commenced ; to have lost sight of 

 the fact that this aimless action of natural selection must be deemed a 

 myth, that the -nhole theory of descent, as Mr. Darwin himself says, 

 must fall to the ground, if one fatal case is proved of a number of 

 species having suddenly started into life all at once. 



If ever any theory demanded in its fullest import the acceptance of that 

 old canon in natural history, quoted by his great master, " Natura non facit 

 saltum,'' that of the gradual progress of organic life requires it to be 

 acknowledged as its most inexorable law — a law as immutable as that which 

 produces the unchanging forms assumed by certain substances in the 

 process of crystallization. 



When the problem comes to be considered how life began again in 

 isolated oceanic regions, such as New Zealand, when this terrible annus 

 mirabilis had passed by, and the ice had retreated from the sequestered 

 shores ; those who believe in the preliminaries, in the universal ice-cap, in 

 the scheme of the evolution of species, so ably, so seductively some may 

 prefer to say, proposed by Mr. Darwin in his attractive pages, and so con- 

 fidently asserted by his adventurous disciples, who respect no limits recog- 

 nized by their master, find themselves face to face with a difficulty of which 

 no explanation is vouchsafed. 



It was difficult enough to imagine any solution that seemed to afford an 

 escape from the dilemma those were placed in who accepted Dr. Haast's 

 ideas regarding the pleistocene glaciation of New Zealand. He does not 

 appear however to assume that the ice-sheet he v,'ould draw over these 

 islands was universal over the southern hemisphere, and may consider 

 that there were regions near where life was not extinguished, and from 

 which their lacertian progenitors might have made their way and founded 

 the families of the apterous birds — if such be their descent — without com- 

 mencing de novo the whole process of evolution from some simple ancestor. 



Accepting even the proposition of the spontaneous generation of the 



