HEREDITY, AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES.* 
HE surface of the earth is inhabited to-day by hun- 
dreds of thousands of forms of life, which upon 
analysis are found to be separable into groups or species, 
with well-marked and characteristic attributes, which may 
be transmitted from generation to generation. The strata 
beneath the surface are found to contain the remains of 
thousands of other forms, now extinct, but which show 
certain general relationships to the existing organisms. 
If we piece together the actual records, and take the back- 
ward bearing of our information, we arrive at a period 
sometime within the last six hundred thousand centuries, 
when living matter was more indeterminate in the forms 
which it assumed, and was, perhaps, quite unlike any 
protoplasm we meet at the present time. 
From this primitive substance series of organisms have 
been produced, which, in the successive stages of the earth’s 
history show an increasing complexity as the present epoch 
is approached, and which embrace more numerous forms 
with the advance of time. 
In this upward movement, this evolution from the sim- 
ple to the complex, in the production of many from few, 
it is not to be taken for granted that protoplasm has been 
a perfect automaton, and that it has nothing but successes 
scored to its credit in the ever-changing conditions it has 
* Lecture delivered before the Barnard Botanical Club, Columbia, Uni- 
wake From The Monist for January, 1906. (Printed in ad- 
