﻿ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. XXxix 



made its nearest approach in organization, instinct, and other attri- 

 butes, to the human type, when the progressive intellect and the 

 rational and moral nature of man became for the first time con- 

 nected with the terrestrial system. 



The question then which I propose to test by the recent discoveries 

 of geology and palaeontology is this : — 



First, whether the position of the fossil remains of plants in the 

 earth's strata is such as to lead us to believe, that a cryptogamic 

 flora preceded one consisting of flowering plants, and that the less 

 perfect of the phanerogamic orders were created before the more 

 perfect, and that the most varied and complex floras were last in 

 historical succession. 



Secondly, whether in like manner in the animal kingdom the 

 cephalopod, fish, reptile, bird, and warm-blooded quadruped made 

 their appearance upon the earth, one after the other, — the Orthoceras 

 occurring in the oldest Silurian strata, the fish in the upper Silurian 

 and Devonian, the reptile in the carboniferous, the bird in the tri- 

 assic, the earliest quadrupedal mammifer in the oolitic, and the 

 first quadrumanous mammal in the tertiary, and lastly, man in 

 the post-tertiary era ; — a series, if established, which would seem 

 almost irresistibly to lead us to the inference that a gradual advance 

 towards a more perfect organization, or at least to an organization 

 more and more resembling that of man, was intimately connected 

 with geological chronology, the creation of the human species consti- 

 tuting the last term in a regular series of organic developments. 



Our efforts to arrive at sound theoretical views on this important 

 question may accelerate the future progress of discovery by directing 

 the collectors of fossils to points where we stand most in need of in- 

 formation, or by stimulating another class of investigators to dredge 

 the bottoms of lakes and seas, in order to teach us what are the laws 

 now governing the imbedding of the remains of living plants and ani- 

 mals in newly-deposited sediment. 



If we proceed then to consider the question first from a botanical 

 point of view, we find that naturalists are by no means agreed as to 

 the existence of an ascending scale of organization in the vegetable 

 world corresponding to that which is very generally recognized in ani- 

 mals. "From the sponge to man," to borrow the words of De Blain- 

 ville, there is a progressive chain of being, often broken, it is true, 



