167 
purposes of his argument, Dr. Gordon has taken us back two hundred and 
fifty years ; but I think we may safely go much further than that. Even at 
the present day English people — not only the illiterate, but people of educa- 
tion also— have quite as much faith in sundry shams as their Saxon ancestors 
of early times reposed in the Eoyal touch of Edward the Confessor, and, per- 
haps, with just as much reason ; and I must admit that even now in certain 
quarters the tendency to materialism sometimes runs parallel with a tendency 
to superstition. Another point which has been brought out by the paper is the 
absolute worship paid in the present day to long words and difficult sentences. 
Some scientific men, apparently for want of appropriate ideas, deliver 
themselves of long-winded sentences, which they present to the world as some- 
thing entirely original. There may be something in the shape of ideas under- 
lying this elaborate phraseology, but either the authors are unable properly to 
express them, or no one is able to understand them when they are expressed. 
When Huxley tells us that certain forms of animal life possess a “ remark- 
able bilaterally symmetrical continuous calcareous skeleton,” he has told us 
what each of us knew before, and raises a suspicion in the mind that this 
great wealth of words is somehow connected with a corresponding paucity 
of ideas. In paragraph sixteen, Dr. Gordon alludes to certain comparisons 
between a man and a dog. Professor Fleming, in his great work on “Animal 
Plagues,” has most clearly demonstrated that, in spite of all the dreadful 
accusations brought against man as a tyrant and destroyer, he is and always 
has been the great physician and friend of the animal creation, and that if 
the dog is, as has been somewhat hyperbolically stated, the friend of man, 
he certainly ought to be, for man is in a hundredfold degree the friend of the 
dog ; and animals enjoying human protection experience an amount of health, 
happiness, and longevity, entirely out of proportion to anything possessed by 
those not so favoured. I think it will be found that those who have to so exag- 
gerated a degree compared man unfavourably with the dog and other animals, 
have been wrong, and that their misanthropic nature explains the reason why 
they have made such a comparison. Of course, I do not accuse Dr. Gordon 
of having done this ; but I assert that the misanthropic nature of some men 
has been the cause of their finding so little sympathy among their fellow men, 
and being thereby induced to fall back on the brute creation. As to the 
sensibility of the latter to pain, I think that, after all, there is a certain germ of 
truth in one part of Descartes’ theory, — namely, that the lower animals have 
not as great sensibility to pain as human beings. 
An Associate [who desires to withdraw his speech as much as possible 
here referred to the benefits, perhaps indirect, w 7 hich had been conferred on 
their time by the alchemists ; to his acquaintance with China and Japan 
not leading him to go with the author in some of his remarks ; to the 
doctrines of Buddhism, an Eastern theory of Creation, and Mr. Davis’s 
recent work. 
Dr. Caddy. — I should like to say a few words, because, whenever I have 
come here and gone away without saying anything, I have always regretted 
it. There is one point in Dr. Gordon’s paper to which I desire briefly to 
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