IS MAN A RINALITY OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION? 

DELIVERED BEFORE THE SCIENTIFIC ASSOCIATION, Fripay Eve., JAN. 14, 1887, 
BY JOHN F. KING. 

Ir is wonderful to behold one of Nature’s great plans worked out with such 
undeviating unity of purpose. Though incalculable ages have passed since 
the nucleus of the American Continent was lifted above the waves, we find 
the announcement then made to have been faithfully prosecuted to the end. 
What convincing proofs of the unity of the creative intelligence? The plastic 
rocks have always been moulded by the hands of the same all-providing 
Artificer. How it exalts our apprehension of His infinite attributes to behold 
Him bringing into existence a series of secondary causes so simple in them- 
selves, but working out a succession of results so complete in their details and 
presenting a history stamped with such uniformity of plan, such harmony of 
parts and such wisdom of design? ‘These are only His doings in the material 
world. 
But let us turn to consider the method which reigns among creatures ex- 
alted with the gift of life. Who has not been amazed at the endless variety of 
animal forms existing upon the earth? ‘There seems to be no conceivable con- 
formation, no possible situation, no circumstances of element, climate, food, or 
condition that have not been made the fitting and essential conditions of some 
type of conscious existence. One animal dwells on the land, another in the 
soil, a third in the air, a fourth in salt water, a fifth in fresh. One burrowsin 
a log, another in a rock, a third in the mud, a fourth in the flesh, or brain, or 
liver, or even in the eye of another animal. Ponderous quadrupeds move 
through the jungle, wily serpents glide among the reeds, the centipede 
crouches under a stone, the minnow darts beneath the sedgy bank, and the’ 
lazy oyster sleeps in the mud at the bottom of the bay. We place beneath the 
microscope a specimen of the mud in which the oyster spends his drowsy life, 
or wsample of the water in which the familiar frog delights, and lo! another 
world is revealed to our vision — vegetable and animal life in forms as varied 
as all that the united eye has seen in the greater world. 
Nor is this all. Every one who has read of forms long since extinct, of 
strange and monstrous forms that sported upon the earth before the empires of 
the brute creation had been subjugated by the intellect of man. As we run 
back through the sons preceding, we tread upon the graves of myriads of 
beings which, in their day, swarmed in the depths of the sea, but whose 
lineage and likeness are now known in history; we push back through the dim 
dawn of beings and stand upon the sandy shore of that uneasy sea in which 
creative power first essayed to mould the plastic clay into animal forms and 
plant in them ethereal fire. How reverently do we turn up the cleaving stone 
and gaze upon a little coral, a lingula, or a trilobite, and think that these 
were the forms which God first exerted his skill upon, and placed first in pos- 
session of our round and verdant planet; and how different those beings from 
all we know upon the earth to-day. What an infinite range of altitudes be- 
