124 THE PRESENT POSITION OF THE THEORY OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION. 



over a wider circle, it will be necessary sooner or later that its terms 

 be restated. 



I have been pained by the implication of many of my critics that 

 Christianity seems to be wedded to out-of-date statements. God and 

 science were put into opposition. What does God mean to me 2 

 It means all this great driving power behind the phenomena which 

 we here call Nature. If God created man He created everything. 

 One way in which God manifests Himself is this regularity of law. 



I do earnestly hope that this Society will try and re-think the 

 questions of religion and express them in modern terms, and they 

 will gain a much wider circle of hearers. 



The Meeting adjourned at 6.25 p.m. 



Further Eeply by the Lecturer. 



(a) In reply 10 Mr. T. B. Bishop, I would say that if the obser- 

 vations which I have mentioned on p. 108 can be repeated and 

 established, they certainly do upset the chief argument of Weis- 

 mann's book. 



(b) It is a fundamental postulate of science that the laws governing 

 Nature are constant and eternal. If evolution occurred long ago, 

 owing to these causes, it must be proceeding now. though slowly. 



(c) There is a good deal of evidence that superficial differences 

 between members of the same brood, family or litter, due to accidents 

 of nutrition are not inheritable, as was assumed by many Darwinians, 

 but not by Darwin himself. Darwin said that variations existed 

 that were sometimes inheritable. Natural selection does not create 

 differences, it only eliminates the unfit. 



(d) As to the quotation from Dr. J. Eeinke, I may say that all this 

 is true. But the fundamental similarity in protoplasm, wherever 

 found, suggests unity of origin. Even if different living cells 

 appeared at once, if they arose in consequence of the same processes 

 operating on the same material there would be a similarity of 

 constitution amounting to blood relationship. 



(e) In Professor BatesoiUs opinion, modern research has upset 

 the argument quoted from Dr. A. R. Wallace's World of Life, but 

 not, I think, in the mind of the majority of naturalists. We most of 

 us think that the kind of variations with which Dr. Bateson has 

 experimented are not the kind which have played a part in the 

 evolution of natural species. 



