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echoed by our members and friends at home and abroad, when I say that this 
paper must be regarded as being one of the most important ever brought 
before the Institute. It is eminently a scientific paper, by one in the very 
highest rank of scientific men, which tends to show “ that there is no dis- 
crepancy between the book of Nature and the book of Revelation, if rightly 
interpreted.” In the present day there are some few men of science, and 
many quasi-scientific men, who seize upon questions of philosophy or science 
said to militate against the truth of Revelation, and who use such in the 
most unscrupulous way to undermine the faith of the world. We hear of 
their publications, generally written with this purpose, many issued under 
the auspices of Secularist societies, reaching readers in every clime.'* One 
of the main objects of the existence of the Victoria Institute is to stay this 
evil ; to examine these questions of philosophy and science in a careful and 
impartial manner, and to give the results to the world. Such work in 
the cause of truth claims the highest talent that the Society and its 
friends can bring to it. 
Professor Stokes. — Considering the lateness of the hour I will say but a 
few words. With regard to my illustration of the possibility of con- 
ceiving, in the manner shown by the late Professor Clerk Maxwell, the 
redistribution of energy, I should observe that the matter contemplated 
was thought of as contained in a vessel merely for the sake of clearness of 
conception. In application of the illustration, the contents of the vessel are 
supposed to represent the universe in the supposed ultimate condition to 
which it tends as a result of the dissipation of energy. One of the 
speakers asked me whether I contemplated a leap, at one bound, from 
a very low organism to a high one ? It certainly never entered my 
head to do so. That is not what evolutionists suppose ; on the contrary, 
thousands and millions of years have passed during which, as they say, these 
changes from one form to another have taken place with exceeding slowness. 
What I meant was, that I did not think that the minor changes of form of 
which alone we have any experimental evidence, such as those of varieties 
of animals or plants in what are deemed the same species, gave us any 
warrant for assuming, as a thing even probable, much less established by a 
fair amount of evidence, that the enormous interval which separates one of 
the higher creatures,— say man himself, — from some low organism, was, in 
fact, bridged over in the past by a succession of such changes. I was also 
asked whether I meant to say that I allowed the existence of life as 
springing from dead matter, and merely said I could not imagine the 
higher creatures as springing by the mere self-action of matter, even 
though organised matter of some low form were thus created. I certainly 
did not say I accepted the production of life from dead matter, but, on 
the contrary, expressed it as my opinion that the best experimental evidence 
* The Indian and Colonial press is also now much used by these societies. 
