242 J. M. CLARKE GEOLOGY AKD ORDER OF THE STATE 



I^one 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 opportunity as contrasted with the 

 otiier great subkingdoms of the annelids 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, however 

 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 occa- 

 sions. The field of observation, and of inference as well, is greatly to l)e 

 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 para- 

 sitic existence, in whatever group in nature, and with whatever expression 

 in the natural assemblage or the community group, involves the essential 

 abandonment of normal direct, upright living and the benefactors thereby 

 are types of life wliich 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 on 

 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 sympath}^, some of the 

 harshness in this inevitable human condition may be ameliorataed, but the 

 paleontologist looking at the record of life on the earth says to this State : 

 Be intelligently guided in the treatment of hereditary community para- 

 sites, defectives, congenital or confirmed misdemeanants, whatever the 

 form of degeneration may be, by recognition of the presumption that 

 in so far as they can not be physiologically corrected, they are abandoned 

 types in which there lies little hope of repair. I can state this conclusion 

 only thus succinctly without here attempting to present or argue its manv 

 ramifications. 



b Soon after the great outburst of articulate life in the Cambrian, 

 wherein, so far as our present knowledge permits, we find the lines along 



