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plished in subordinating and adapting nature to his ends has 
been through the development of’ the faculty that first 
taught him to shape an implement out of a stone. That 
line of demarcation separates man on the one side from 
physical nature by all that is possible in invention, and on 
the other side separates him from other animals by all that 
is actual in achievements over nature. 
Hence the prominence given by science to the Stone Age 
involves no controversy with the philosophy of man. That 
age is not derogatory to man as philosophy would present 
him in his intellectual and moral attributes. The surveying, 
measuring, choosing, purposing, conquering intelligence is 
already there, discriminating him from the brute not only 
quantitively, but qualitatively also. The old arguments of 
philosophy for the exaltation of man are indeed brought in 
question by modern science. Consciousness, language, rea- 
son, reflection, memory, imagination, the domestic affections, 
the emotions, and even the moral feelings, — all these, once 
assumed to be distinguishing prerogatives of the human 
species, are now claimed in some degree for different animals. 
I shall not trespass here on this debatable ground. Science 
has first of all to do with facts, without regard to their 
bearing upon theories of philosophy and ethics. But it is 
science that offers us the Stone Age as an incontestable 
witness for man. And surely, the germs of the spiritual 
and the ethical are given in an intelligence that first addressed 
itself to the mastery of rude nature for human ends. The 
conquest of thought over matter began in the making of 
implements ; and the first rude scratches to record memory, 
feeling, or fancy foreshadowed that supreme implement of 
thought by which man gives permanence to knowledge by 
the written page, records the phenomena of nature and the 
discoveries of science, and transmits to other ages the history 
of the race. 
The Chairman. — I am sure that the meeting will allow me to return thanks 
to Mr. Callard for the manner in which he has read this short but interesting 
paper, written by one of our members who has now gone to his rest. 
Mr. D. Howard, F.C.S. — I think we must all agree that the paper is a 
very interesting one, inasmuch as it calls attention to what is the weak 
point in the doctrine of evolution, which requires the continuous natural 
evolution of species linked altogether but with no gaps, because in this 
theory a single gap is fatal. It is of no use to tell us that there 
