TKAXSMITATIOX OF I.NORGAXIC TO THE OROAX'IC 247 



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

 when b}' every line of sequential reasoning they should exist, this impor- 

 tant 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 paranerobic 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 

 accumulative 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 itself — it is normal living. I think we may 

 well urge on the attention of pathogenists the importance of estimating 

 the historic impress which is, in all disease-making bacteria, the natural 

 primitive and inherited hostility to the sunlight. In the adjustments 

 and readjustments of these parasites to special hosts and specific toxic 

 processes some may have overcome in a measure this natural antagonism, 

 but for the most their work is in the dark. The marvelous results which 

 have been attained in the treatment of tetanus during the present war, 

 by simple and constant exposure to the sunlight, encourages us to believe 

 that in similar pathology a like treatment would be historically and 

 logically correct. 



Fifty years ago, when President Andrew D. White published his "War- 

 fare of science and religion," he said, "A truth written upon the human 

 heart today in its full play of emotions or passions can not be at any real 

 variance with the truth written upon a fossil whose poor life ebbed forth 

 millions of years ago." These fifty years since have enabled us to say 

 with equal security that the record written on the fossil is the candle by 

 which we must read the fate of the community, the passions and emotions 

 of the human heart. 



We have been shocked into a consciousness that not all the virtues abide 

 in us. You may recall the ancient days of Eome when the people an- 



XVII — Bull. Geol. Soc. Am.. Vol. 28. 11)10 



