73 
INTERMEDIATE MEETING, March 18, 1872. 
The Rev. J. B. Owen, M.A., in the Chair. 
The Minutes of the last meeting were read and confirmed, and the fol- 
lowing Elections announced 
Life Member : — Lewis Biden, Esq., 9, Victoria Chambers, Westminster. 
Member : — Major-General C. J. Cooke, 49, Eastbourne Terrace. 
Associate : — A. Hall, Esq., Haxted House, Bromley, Kent. 
The following paper, inserted here in accordance with a special resolution 
passed by the Council, was then read by the Author : — 
DARWINISM TESTED BY RECENT RESEARCHES 
IN LANGUAGE. By Frederic Bateman, Esq., M.D., 
Physician to the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, &c. &c. 
P ERHAPS no works in modern times have been so largely 
read and so freely criticised, and have exercised so great 
an influence for good or for evil, as the “ Origin of Species ” and 
the “Descent of Man.” The subject of which they treat is one 
of such absorbing personal interest, as tending to gratify the 
ardent desire for knowledge of the “ where and the whither ” of 
the human race, that these books have been received and perused 
with avidity, not only by professed naturalists, theologians, and 
men of science, but by a far wider circle of general readers. 
It has been said of Luther that he was the monk that shook 
the world. It may with equal propriety be said that Mr. Darwin 
is the naturalist, who, by a hypothesis so strangely at variance 
with our traditions, has shaken the foundations of the religious 
world. 
As the avowed object of the Victoria Institute is to investi- 
gate apparent discrepancies between Christianity and Science, 
and to deal with some of the modern forms of supposed anta- 
gonism between Science and Scripture, and as in my opinion the 
Darwinian hypothesis of the origin of man is directly opposed to 
the teaching of revealed religion, it seems to me that this is a 
YOL. VII. G 
