GEOLOGICAL EXTERMINATIONS. 



179 



authority'as early as Dana, whom he quotes. Dana was not so much 

 a palaeontologist as a great mineralogist, but the author of the paper 

 certainly might have quoted Huxley and several other able authori- 

 ties affording abundant evidence of the continuity of life, which has 

 never been broken or interrupted since its first dawn upon our earth. 



Eev. A. Irving, D.Sc, B.A. — We are very much indebted to 

 Dr. Woodward for his remarks. I have learnt something from 

 them, and I should like to draw attention to one or two views that 

 fell from him. As to one thing in particular, the effect of the 

 relative proportions of carbonic acid in the atmosphere upon the life 

 of plants. Dr. Woodward informed us that certain experiments at 

 Kew had led to the conclusion that much carbonic acid kills the 

 plant. My experimental investigations carried on at Wellington 

 College in the " eighties " led to that conclusion, so long as I dealt 

 with simply a mixture of carbonic acid and nitrogen ; but when I 

 introduced an equivalent amount of oxygen — about one volume of 

 oxygen to one volume of carbonic acid along with nitrogen, I found 

 that the plant-growth increased with rapidity, and moreover, with 

 their roots saturated with water (as those of the coal measure plants 

 were when growing), with exactly the same conditions of light, and 

 in every way exposed to the same conditions, except in the 

 proportions of the gases, to which their foliage was exposed. 



No well-informed student of geology would dream of reviving 

 the obsolete notion of " cataclysmic " disappearances of life, to which 

 Dr. Woodward has made reference. That cannot fairly be read 

 into Dr. Warring's paper. We should recollect, however, that the 

 main business of the Victoria Institute is not with the detailed 

 investigations of this or that special science, but with the co- 

 ordination of the results achieved in all the sciences with those arrived 

 at in other lines of research. From that point of view the most 

 important and most interesting part of the paper before the meeting 

 is found in the concluding paragraphs. It opens up a vast field for 

 discussion, but, as time is short, it may suffice to say that in Nature 

 and in Eevelation alike we find the great law of Evolution 

 written upon all things; but that law is not all, and does 

 not account for all, that comes within the ken of the human mind 

 in the universe of Being. In the light of that higher "monism" 

 which runs through the Bible revelation we can trace a directing 

 influence, which has not left the wild forces of Nature to work out 



