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this valuable paper, and I, for one, beg to thank Professor Stokes for the 
information he has given us. 
Rev. R. W. Kennion. — Did I understand Professor Stokes to say, 
that it might be that life could be produced spontaneously, but that he 
felt there was vast and great difficulty in coming to the conclusion that 
the minute and low organisms in the germs to which he referred were 
spontaneously produced, and that still there would be great difficulty 
in believing how from these germs you could arrive at the higher and 
superior forms of life ? It seems to me that, if you once take the im- 
mense leap involved in the admission of spontaneous generation, you have 
a comparatively small difficulty in taking the very much higher step of going 
by degrees up and up, until you get to the higher organisms. I am afraid I 
did not correctly gather the Professor’s view upon this subject. 
Rev. J. J. Coxhead. — I should be glad to have some further explanation 
from Professor Stokes on the question of design. This is, undoubtedly, one 
of the most interesting and important questions that is now submitted to 
the scientific mind, and it is one of those positions on which there is the 
greatest determination to move forward from the quarter of scepticism and 
unbelief. As we trace the formation of the very highest organism, we 
undoubtedly see that certain limbs and organs are necessary to the 
existence of the particular organizations which are found to exist, and, 
on the other hand, in the process of ages these have been found useless 
and that they have decayed and been lost. This is the great problem 
of the present day, and I have never seen an altogether satisfactory 
answer given to the objections on the other side. Strongly as I object to 
them, I object to them on utterly different grounds from the so-called 
scientific grounds. It is not necessary that I should explain upon what 
grounds I am a believer in Christian revelation, but, at the same time, those 
grounds do not rest, in their first foundation, on principles of scientific 
theology. It seems to me that these kinds of truths present themselves to 
the human mind in different ways, according to the different classes of mind. 
There are some people who cannot see the necessity for what we call design, 
whereas others, as strongly, are unable to conceive how it can be that design 
should not exist in the universe. 
Rev. S. Wainwright, D.D. — No one has yet drawn attention to one or two 
points in Professor Stokes’s paper which I think demand some notice. I 
was particularly interested when Professor Stokes approached the point at 
which he put this question tentatively — is it a credible hypothesis, or is it 
hypothetically credible, that you may take the nebular theory as it has been 
laid down ? In dealing with this it is necessary to see how it was in the first 
instance regarded by Herschel, and then how the whole theory previ- 
ously entertained was blown into space by the first look through Lord 
Rosse’s telescope, when it was seen that the nebulae were not nebulae, but 
were resolved into clustered stellar points ; while, since then, as Professor 
Stokes states, through Dr. Huggins’s discoveries by means of the spectro- 
