President's Address. 
201 
mankind existed for ages beyond the commonly-received 
chronology, few geologists who have studied the question 
can for a moment have any doubt. But whether this were 
sixteen thousand or sixty thousand years, we have no means 
of determining, and all numerical expressions merely excite 
the hostility of the prejudiced, and provoke unnecessary and 
retarding discussion. 
Life — Progressive Development. — Lastly, this question of 
man's antiquity naturally suggests the comportment of geo- 
logy towards the whole subject of vital development as de- 
ducible from the facts of palaeontology. Admitting the 
order of ascent from lower to higher forms (and numerous 
as the missing links may be, no one has yet denied this 
order of ascent on the great scale), the question still remains 
to be solved — and geology, as the originator and establisher 
of the doctrine of vital progression, is bound to consider 
it — How, and by what means has this progress from lower 
to higher forms been effected ? There are two methods, 
as we have elsewhere observed,* by which the problem 
seems capable of solution, though both require much more 
minute and extensive observation than science has yet at 
her command : first, the changes in the organisms them- 
selves maybe such as to indicate the manner in which they 
have been affected, and, by inference, the causes that pro- 
duced them ; and, second, if there is a law of perpetual 
progression, it must be still operative on living plants and 
animals, and v\^e might arrive at its nature by a careful study 
of the variations which existing species undergo, and the 
proximate causes on which these variations depend. Than 
these, scientifically speaking, there is no other way of ap- 
proaching the question. To appeal to the doctrine of crea- 
tive acts and the will of the Creator, is to put the question 
beyond the limits of science — to treat it as a matter of faith, 
and not as a subject of logical investigation. As geologists, 
it is evident we must deal with the problem as one of natural 
history — reasoning from result to cause, and from the order 
of causation to the higher bearings of a general and enduring- 
law. There need be no uneasy tenderness in dealing with 
* Philosophy of Geology : Blackwood & Sons, 1863. 
