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The Chairman (the Rev. Prebendary Row) — having conveyed the thanks 
of the Institute to Dr. M'Cann for his paper,— observed, that he had care- 
fully studied the general laws of evidence, but that he had given less atten- 
tion to those which regulate the inductions of physical science than to any 
other branch of the question. No doubt the principles of the paper were 
capable of a for wider application than to this special subject, and the appli- 
cation of the principles contained in the latter part of it were of much value. 
That portion of the paper which dealt with the subject of transmitted instincts 
seemed worthy of great consideration, as the question was becoming one of 
grave importance in reference to the controversies of the day ; but before any 
general theory could be laid down upon this subject, it would be necessary to 
collect a much greater number of facts respecting it than those already 
in our possession. He for from wished to dispute that instincts were in 
some way or other transmissible ; but it was quite clear that we were not 
in a position to determine the law which regulated their transmission. The 
fact that the father of the working bee was a drone who never gathered 
honey or performed any labour in the hive, and the mother one whose 
exclusive business was to breed, afforded a conclusive proof that the 
instinct of the working bee was not a mere accumulation of instincts 
gradually acquired through a long succession of fathers and mothers. He made 
this remark because there were not wanting persons occupying a high stand- 
ing in the ranks of physical science, who affirmed that the moral nature of man 
was merely the result of a mass of accumulated instincts gradually acquired 
in the course of an indefinite (nay, almost infinite) number of generations. 
No less unknown, he might almost say capricious, was the law which regu- 
lated the transmission of likeness, whether it were mental or bodily, passing 
over one or two generations, and reappearing in another ; but the trans- 
mission of likeness in some way or other was unquestionably a fact. In the 
same manner there could be no doubt that many of our actions, and even 
of the operations of our intellects, were automatic. Many of his own mental 
operations were carried on in a manner that he was utterly unable to analyze 
the process by which they were performed. What was designated “ cerebra- 
tion ” might account for some of these phenomena, but he did not think’ that 
it could account for all of them. Again, with respect to adaptation, more 
popularly designated design ; any one who examined the structure of living 
organisms, and yet who denied that they testified to the existence of an Intel- 
ligence, seemed to him to maintain a most astonishing paradox. He was glad 
to find that the late Mr. J. S. Mill, in his posthumous essays, admitted the 
validity of this argument. He (Mr. Row) admitted that the argument from 
design had been unduly pressed in some cases ; but it was manifest that the 
innumerable adaptations in nature could only be accounted for on the sup- 
position that they originated in intelligence. What was the only substitute that 
scientific men who denied its existence could find for it ? An infinite chain 
of happy coincidences and concurrences of events during the eternity of the 
