﻿ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. lxxiii 



chain of successive development of which we stand in need? For 

 the superiority of man, as compared to the irrational mammalia, is 

 one of kind rather than of degree, consisting in a rational and moral 

 nature, with an intellect capable of indefinite progression, and not in 

 the perfection of his physical organization, or those instincts in 

 which he resembles the brutes. 



If, therefore, the doctrine of successive development had been 

 palaeontologically true, as I have endeavoured in this discourse to 

 show that it is not ; — if the sponge, the cephalopod, the fish, the 

 reptile, the bird, and the mammifer, had followed each other in re- 

 gular chronological order, the creation of each of those classes being 

 separated from the other by vast intervals of time; and if it were clear 

 that man had been created later by at least one entire period — still 

 I should have been wholly unable to recognize in his entrance upon 

 the earth the last term of one and the same series of developments. 

 Even then, the creation of man would rather seem to have been the 

 beginning of some new and different order of things. 



By the creation of a species, I simply mean the beginning of a 

 new series of organic phenomena, such as we usually understand 

 by the term 'species.' Whether such commencements be brought 

 about by the direct intervention of the First Cause, or by some un- 

 known Second Cause or Law appointed by the Author of Nature, is 

 a point upon which I will not venture to offer a conjecture. That 

 some of these species or series of vital phenomena occasionally come 

 to an abrupt termination in our own times, as they have done in 

 every preceding geological epoch, is no longer disputed, and the ar- 

 guments of those who imagine that new creations entirely ceased 

 from the moment that man was introduced into the globe (the de- 

 stroying agencies continuing in full activity while the renovating 

 power was suspended), appear tome inconclusive and premature. It 

 would be presumptuous to assume that the presence of the human 

 race upon the land could affect, still less utterly change, those laws 

 which have governed the organic world in the ocean for millions of 

 years ; and if we enlarge our ideas respecting the antiquity of man, 

 and concede those ten thousand or even twenty thousand years 

 which some ethnologists demand in order to account for the early 

 civilization of nations and the origin of their languages, we must 



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