﻿ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. lxXV 



After sixty years of renewed inquiry, and after we have greatly 

 enlarged the sphere of our knowledge, the same conclusion seems to 

 me to hold true. But if any one should appeal to such results in 

 support of the doctrine of an eternal succession, I may reply that 

 the evidence has become more and more decisive in favour of the 

 recent origin of our own species. The intellect of man and his 

 spiritual and moral nature are the highest works of creative power 

 known to us in the universe, and to have traced out the date of 

 their commencement in past time, to have succeeded in referring so 

 memorable an event to one out of a long succession of periods, each 

 of enormous duration, is perhaps a more wonderful achievement of 

 Science, than it would be to have simply discovered the dawn of 

 vegetable or animal life, or the precise time when out of chaos, or out 

 of nothing, a globe of inanimate matter was first formed. 



Note. — Lower Silurian Reptile. — I have not alluded in this 

 Address to the recent discovery of the track of a quadruped im- 

 printed on a Lower Silurian sandstone in North America. We are 

 indebted to Mr. Logan, now at the head of the Government Survey 

 in Canada, for having carefully determined the position of the rock 

 containing it. The locality is the village of Beauharnois, on the 

 south side of the St. Lawrence, twenty miles above Montreal. The 

 rock, a fine-grained whitish sandstone, quarried for building, be- 

 longs to the group called the Potsdam sandstone by the New York 

 Surveyors, and lies at the base of the whole fossiliferous series of 

 North America. The markings were first pointed out to Mr. Logan 

 by Mr. Abraham, editor of the Montreal Gazette, who appreciated 

 their geological importance. Assuming the Chelonian origin of these 

 foot-prints, they constitute the earliest indication of reptile-life yet 

 known, and are not only anterior to the most ancient memorials 

 of fish hitherto detected, but agree in date with the first known signs 

 of well-defined organic bodies, such as Lingulse, met with in the 

 same rock. Professor Owen, of the College of Surgeons, has exa- 

 mined a slab of the sandstone, on the upper surface of which the 

 foot-prints are impressed, together with a plaster cast of the remainder 

 of the continuous trail, in all 1 2\ feet long, brought to London by 



