100 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



would seem, struggled now and again to regain their primitive in- 

 dependence and maintain it, but the early condemnation of the law 

 has overawed them and out of them all has come, and can come 

 nothing better. They had their chance. That chance was missed ; 

 for untold millions of years they have failed to improve. They still 

 cumber the earth and teach the lesson of an incurable heritage. You 

 who are students of ancient life know how great is the multitude of 

 lessons like this. 



None of the observations of the competent have afforded any 

 evidence that the lines of development through such groups of lowly 

 animals have led to anything of promise or of excellence. The ages 

 have rolled away and left them still with us, progressed, arrested or 

 degenerate within their own narrow limitations, as the case may be. 

 There is no evidence to indicate that these great groups from which 

 nothing can be expected were deprived of their equality of oppor- 

 tunity as contrasted with the other great subkingdoms of the anne- 

 lids and the articulates from one or the other of which, or from one 

 and the other in succession, our own line has been derived. 



The lesson then is this, that dependent conditions of life, how- 

 ever we may see them, throughout untamed nature or in our own 

 communities, are not primitive, are not in the essence of things, but 

 they are set back so far in the history of life that they are now or 

 seem to be unavoidable and unconquerable. 



These evidences I have discussed before this society on previous 

 occasions. The field of observation and of inference as well, is 

 greatly to be enlarged and well justifies the appeals that have been 

 made on its behalf, but so much at least is indicated : that here and 

 in analogous cases parasitic existence in whatever group in nature, 

 and with whatever expression in the natural assemblage or the com- 

 munity group, involves the essential abandonment of normal direct 

 upright living and the benefactors thereby are types of life which 

 nature has cast out and aside as hopeless. 



It is probably yet to be determined, at least there is no record I 

 can find, that even in the passing of the ages nature has ever set up 

 again upon its feet an organism or group of organisms once fallen 

 into this dejected mode of life. 



It is well the state should recognize this harsh truth which is a 

 law. With a police power guided by intelligence and sympathy, 

 some of the harshness in this inevitable human condition may be 

 ameliorated, but the paleontologist looking at the record of life on 

 the earth says to this state: Be intelligently guided in the treat- 



