THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 
251 
world, it is admitted that there is a great gulf between the living 
and the non-living — the organic and the inorganic. Professor 
Huxley says, in his article " Biology," in the Encyclopedia Brit- 
annica, that "the properties of living matter distinguish it absolutely 
from all other kinds of things." 1 The smallest living speck 
known to science — though only 7 ^§ ggg Q of a cubic inch — exhibits, 
as Dr. Dallinger has so wonderfully shown, the essential character- 
istics of the more elaborate organic structures. " It moves," he 
says, "with the agility of the grayling, and the grace of a swallow;" 
"it effects," by the assimilation of surrounding matter to its own, 
" analyses and complicated syntheses which . . . baffle all the 
synthetic chemistry of man," and, also, "it multiplies with astound- 
ing rapidity." 2 The problem is, then, to say whence came, in the 
past history of the earth, the first and simplest form of Life 1 
To the uninitiated it may seem to be an impossibility, apart 
from a source more than human, to make any affirmation, or to 
arrive at any probable conclusion, concerning the beginning of so 
strange and subtle a thing as the first organic creature millions of 
years back in the past; and probably there are some who are 
disposed to discourage all research and discussion in reference to it 
as being, in their judgment, something more than worthless. Need 
I say that such a procedure is really based on scepticism as to the 
functions of the intellect in relation to its surroundings, or else on 
an oversight of the conditions which regulate, and the conditions 
which restrict, the acquisition of knowledge. The vast accumula- 
tion of knowledge on all kinds of subjects, ancient and modern, 
close at hand and remote, patent to the eye and hidden in the deep 
recesses of Nature, during the last half century has surely taught 
us that our personal presence is not necessary to our knowing that 
a fact in the progress of Nature occurred, or that we must be able 
to analyse an event while in process of being brought to pass in 
order to know the causes that have entered into it. We know 
positively what the earth was millions of years ago, though none 
of us were there to look upon it. We know that gravitation acts 
in Neptune and in the sun, though we have never witnessed a 
stone or a world falling into them. We know something of how 
the sedimentary rocks were formed, and of the kind of materials 
from whence they came, though none like them may have been 
formed in our day. Although, of course, the boundaries of 
1 Vol. iii. p. 679. 2 The Creator. Fernley Lecture, p. 30. 
