REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR I916 105 



one head or many. The principle of absolute majority rule is as 

 profoundly immoral and as profoundly undemocratic as is the 

 principle of the divine right of kings. Majority rule is a practical 

 device for the working of free institutions and not a principle 

 without limits or bounds upon which free institutions may be based." 



This is the teaching of our science ; the ephemeral worth of 

 majority control is always obvious; the voice of the people is not 

 the voice of God. 



e We have come to a point in our researches where observation 

 and inference teach us that life originated in unicellular microbic 

 forms under conditions which have been indirectly indicated by the 

 Chamberlins, father and son, as governed by and intimately asso- 

 ciated with a conjunction of soil and moisture, with obstructed air, 

 and probably without direct exposure to the actinic action of the 

 sunlight. There has already been interesting and substantial con- 

 firmation of the presence of actual bacteria in the most ancient 

 rocks of continental origin antedating the Cambrian, and many 

 well-demonstrated expressions. The discovery of fossil bacteria 

 is to be accredited to several students, Van Ingen among others, but 

 their existence in this age preceding the primordial outburst of life, 

 in times when by every line of sequential reasoning they should 

 exist, this important determination is among the brilliant results of 

 Walcott's researches. 



So now every legitimate evidence of fact and deduction points 

 to the origin of microbic unicellular life in the moist, subaerated 

 soil away from the direct sun ; and the soils of today are alive — a 

 mighty host — with such microbic creations existing under parane- 

 robic conditions. This army, we are coming to understand, is 

 endowed with specialized functions ; and if this statement is, and is 

 to remain, approximately correct, then the acquisition of such 

 special functions speaks of a long past with its gradual and cumula- 

 tive inheritance. It still remains to be demonstrated that the cycle 

 of life is renewing itself from day to day by the continued trans- 

 mutation of the inorganic to the organic, however such a possibility 

 may lie in the lap of logic. But it is well for us to realize that this 

 microbic life which in the passage of time has become adapted to 

 such special functions that we recognize among them germs of 

 disease as well as of benignancy, has the historic impress of hostility 

 to the direct rays of the sun. Microbic disease is disease only from 

 the human standpoint, from the point of view of the host of the 

 disease-causing parasite. For the germ — the microbic parasite 



