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Bree has succeeded in showing that Darwinism may tend to an attack on 
religious thought, and I have been surprised to hear some members take 
Mr. Darwin’s side. 
The Hon. Secretary. — I think they merely stated what they conceived to 
be Mr. Darwin’s views, in order that those views might be made known in 
the absence of Mr. Darwin’s own friends, several of whom were supplied 
with copies of Dr. Bree’s paper, and invited to attend this meeting ; un- 
fortunately they have failed to put in an appearance, which is to be regretted, 
because it has rather damped the interest which might otherwise have 
attached to the discussion. It may interest many present if I relate the sub- 
stance of a conversation I had the other day with Dr. Parker, the President 
of the Microscopical Society. He showed me the results of a large number 
of experiments which he and Professor Huxley have been making, and 
stated that up to the present time their labours at South Kensington had 
failed to prove the connection between man and the rest of creation — in 
fact there was, he said, no point at which they appeared to join. He 
added : — 
“We can classify, and have classified, the whole of the animal kingdom 
that we are acquainted with. We have put all the different animals into 
their separate places, and we have constantly got hold of man, and tried to 
put him into his place ; but he would fit nowhere. There is such an immea- 
surable gulf between him, with all his attributes, and the rest of creation, and 
everything tends to prove that he must have been a separate creation.” (Hear, 
hear.) 
I give these as being as near as possible the ipsissima verba of Dr. Parker, 
than whom, I think, there is not a much higher authority in England. 
With regard to the remarks to the effect that Sir William Thompson had 
said, or had allowed others to say for him, that his theory of vegetation 
coming to us from another planet, by means of meteoric stones, was only 
a joke, — I fear I must remark that this is the only excuse which a number 
of his friends, and some newspapers, have been able to make for his having, 
as a man of science, put forward such a theory. (Hear, hear.) 
Dr. Bree. — I do not think we have any cause to regret that no professed 
Darwinian is present, for I am sure that if there had been, he could not have 
stated the arguments in favour of Mr. Darwin’s theories more ably, or more 
pointedly, than one or two of the speakers we have heard. With regard to 
Sir William Thompson’s meteoric theory being a joke on his part, those who 
say this must remember that the theory was propounded in his Address before 
the British Association, with just as much gravity as characterized the asser- 
tion of Dr. Hooker at Norwich, that almost all the philosophers of the world 
were Darwinians. Sir William Thompson is a great physicist ; but Dr. 
Lionel Beale expressly states, in his Life Theories and Religious Thought , 
that in his opinion that part of Darwinism which includes the evolution of 
living beings by physical laws, is utterly opposed to every principle of reli- 
gion ; and, therefore, I am astonished when I hear it stated that the doctrine 
of evolution is consistent with the Bible. Had I possessed the time, I 
