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to present to others Scientific Truth. I ask you to remember this, to con- 
sider this ; and then I ask you to judge us.” 
I hope I may be pardoned for having read this last quota- 
tion, which goes beyond the point under consideration. The 
fact is, I could not refrain from giving you the pleasure of 
hearing — even if it may be of hearing over again — this 
eloquent peroration, this admirable appeal to the highest 
feelings of our nature as men. But having done so, I would 
respectfully say, let us on the other side be judged as con- 
siderately and fairly. I will further say this, I do not know a 
person who would dare to reject a single scientific doctrine 
which he really believed to be true. I do not even understand 
how it would be possible for a man to do so. Men may shut 
their eyes, I know well, to proofs or arguments on either side. 
On both sides they may often take their science or their theo- 
logy, perhaps contentedly, at second-hand. But those who enter 
the lists to discuss those matters have nothing to do with such. 
I trust it has been thus far seen that I do not shrink from 
looking all the facts and issues fully and fairly in the face. 
Were it not that it was next to impossible to go over the 
whole system of nature in a single lecture, we might even 
complain that Professor Huxley went no lower than the chalk 
deposits, — the mere commencement of the Cretaceous system, 
or the surface of the Secondary Formations. For we must 
also remember the fact that, below the Cretaceous beds (that 
is, if the usual order of formations has not recently been 
“ turned upside down” !) we come to the Weal den, the Oolitic, 
the Triassic, the Permian, Carboniferous, Devonian, and 
Silurian Systems ; all these having each their numerous sub- 
divisions ; and, after these, we have still to go deeper and 
deeper, till we come to the Crystalline rocks, and the “ funda- 
mental Granite,” belonging to what was once called (if I may 
now mention them) “the Azoic ages”! Well, then, how 
are we to deal with this great world, if, beginning with its 
surface, we proceed to strip it successively in imagination of 
all its various strata, one after another, as we stripped the 
Nile valley of its paltry annual deposits of mud; and if after- 
wards we essay to get rid of the non- sedimentary conglo- 
merates and other masses that lie below ? I know that, as 
regards all living organisms of the earth. Professor Huxley, in 
his Man’s Place in Nature , has announced his readiness to 
oegin them all with an atom-like “ egg ” l But, then, surely he 
does not believe that the marvellous, hidden life within such 
eggs could produce the least visible growth of the organisms 
unless there wex’e pre-existing materials which it could appro- 
