authority as early as Dana, whom he quotes. Dana was not so much a palæontologist as a great mineralogist, but the author of the paper certainly might have quoted Huxley and several other able authorities affording abundant evidence of the continuity of life, which has never been broken or interrupted since its first dawn upon our earth. Rev. A. IRVING, D.Sc., B.A.-We are very much indebted to Dr. Woodward for his remarks. I have learnt something from them, and I should like to draw attention to one or two views that fell from him. As to one thing in particular, the effect of the relative proportions of carbonic acid in the atmosphere upon the life of plants. Dr. Woodward informed us that certain experiments at Kew had led to the conclusion that much carbonic acid kills the plant. My experimental investigations carried on at Wellington College in the "eighties " led to that conclusion, so long as I dealt with simply a mixture of carbonic acid and nitrogen; but when I introduced an equivalent amount of oxygen-about one volume of oxygen to one volume of carbonic acid along with nitrogen, I found that the plant-growth increased with rapidity, and moreover, with their roots saturated with water (as those of the coal measure plants were when growing), with exactly the same conditions of light, and in every way exposed to the same conditions, except in the proportions of the gases, to which their foliage was exposed.

No well-informed student of geology would dream of reviving the obsolete notion of "cataclysmic" disappearances of life, to which Dr. Woodward has made reference. That cannot fairly be read into Dr. Warring's paper. We should recollect, however, that the main business of the Victoria Institute is not with the detailed investigations of this or that special science, but with the coordination of the results achieved in all the sciences with those arrived at in other lines of research. From that point of view the most important and most interesting part of the paper before the meeting is found in the concluding paragraphs. It opens up a vast field for discussion, but, as time is short, it may suffice to say that in Nature and in Revelation alike we find the great law of Evolution written upon all things; but that law is not all, and does not account for all, that comes within the ken of the human mind in the universe of Being. In the light of that higher "monism which runs through the Bible revelation we can trace a directing influence, which has not left the wild forces of Nature to work out

their results in a purely hap-hazard sort of way, such as is implied in the Darwinian dogma; we can, in fact, recognise directivity (as defined by Professor George Henslow) in the very variations, which must be antecedent to selection. Evolution pure and simple must imply that every new departure on the road of development is evolved solely out of the facts that preceded it, and the material and other properties latent in those facts, including environment. Yet when we come to consider the origin of matter and its properties, we are a long way from grasping any intelligent idea of matter originating in mind, though everything in Nature proclaims a controlling mind.

Again, the mystery of life is inscrutable; and whatever ideas we may ultimately get as to the intrinsic nature of life, it is not likely that we shall ever get rid of that element of scientific faith which holds the minds of Haeckel and his followers. The sneer from that side implied in the word "miracle" is but an "appeal to the (Agnostic) gallery"; and it is illogical for Haeckel to maintain that a legitimate place is found for faith (implying an exercise of the imagination) in science, and at the same time to dismiss the exercise of precisely the same intellectual faculties in the field of religion as mere "illusion and fancy." And so we are led on to the mysteries involved in the great Christian verities, and to that "pure Agnosticism" of George Romanes, which is content to say, "I don't know," "I don't understand," without having the effrontery to say (ergo) "You don't know or understand." "Nobody can know or understand." Such Agnostic dogmatism is utterly unphilosophical, and must remain so, until at least the origin of matter and its properties, and the origin of life with its vast variety of manifestations are removed from the region of the unexplained quâ natural causation.

Rev. JOHN TUCKWELL, M.R.A.S.-With very much of this paper I am in entire agreement. But there are some important facts to which insufficient weight has been allowed. First of all I do not think we can rely upon the uniformitarian principle altogether in the geological processes of the past.

The very fact that at certain epochs many more forms of life disappeared and with much greater geological suddenness than at others, implies something more than the ordinary processes of nature. The late Professor Prestwich, in a paper read before this Institute ten years ago, pointed out that a great diluvial catastrophe overtook

the continent of Europe in post-Pliocene times, I believe, which must have swept away the whole of its mammalian life. He connected this with the traditional Deluge, and I suppose the tens of thousands of mammoths and mastodons whose remains have been found in some cases frozen, and the flesh in a perfect state of preservation, must have perished suddenly and probably in connection with the same event.

I quite agree with the author that the mere elevation of the earth's surface will not account for these events.

Dr. WALTER KIDD, F.Z.S.-Without being a geologist, I desire to point out that this important subject of geological exterminations. has considerable bearing upon current and unsolved problems in biology. The exclusive sway of selection in the production of new forms of life has received of late years strong support from Darwin's greatest follower, and Weismann has summed up his own life's work in two volumes, The Evolution Theory, in which he has elaborated further his theory of germinal selection invented ten years ago, so as to rehabilitate the doctrine of Darwin's natural (personal) selection. He has finally declared, after great study of the matter, that Lamarckism is a delusion, and that acquired characters are not. transmissible. This sweeping doctrine is intimately connected with our subject of to-day thus: granting that evolution or modification of species has taken place through the ages of geology, this must have come about in one of three ways-either by direct modification of the organism by its environments and use of function-or by selection alone, or by the combined actions of selection and useinheritance and direct environmental action. Weismann is forced to allow that among unicellular organisms environmental influence is supreme, but maintains that when multicellular organisms arose and amphimixis (or the mingling of two streams of heredity from two parents) occurred, the influence of environments and use and disuse in evolution abruptly ceased, and that at this dividing line in the history of the organic world selection remained in unquestionable predominance, and that selection is even anterior to the birth of the organism, for it begins in the germ. The fact shown to-day, in the paper before us, that exterminations on a vast scale have continued through geological history by reason of changes of atmosphere, water and soil, is a glaring contradiction to this pan-selectionist theory of Weismann. These exterminations are, many of them at

least, wholesale, and so much so that individual variations could have no influence upon individual survival. We may not affirm the old doctrine of repeated catastrophes, but surely many of the great extinctions of floras and faunas of the world have been quite as vast as the catastrophes formerly supposed, although they have been obviously gradual in most cases. We have but to look at the face of a chalk cliff some hundred feet high, literally composed of the skeletons of the Foraminifera, Polycistina, and Diatoms with their débris, or the "Atlantic Ooze" of to-day, going through the experience of the chalk of the Cretaceous period, or to study a bed of Nummulitic limestone some thousands of feet in thickness, and to examine a piece of this from the Great Pyramid, and find nummulites of all sizes from a split pea to a florin; we have only to consider these gigantic evidences of organism entombed en masse by the physical agencies concerned in geological exterminations, to see that individual fitness to survive can have had, in these vast masses of organisms, no part or lot in the matter. What individual fitness, we may ask, determined the death or survival of the myriads of club-mosses and tree-ferns which went to make up the coal-measures of the world? They perished evidently en masse, and it may be assumed that such of them as happened to live to propagate their species with variations suited to new environments were directly modified by the changing environments.

We have heard of the heroic Sixth Brigade of the Japanese before Port Arthur, making one of the most desperate assaults ever made by infantry on powerful forts, going into action with 5,000 men, of whom 400 alone remained when the forts were taken, and of the Colonel of the 1st Regiment, the hero of fifty-seven combats, who habitually exposed himself in the firing line, and who according to the usual calculations should have been long ago dead and buried, and we are forced to admit that no more did the colonel survive because he was fitted to survive than did the 4,600 of the Sixth Brigade fall because they were unfitted to survive under the remorseless extermination of shell fire and bullets. This, I submit, is parallel to the wholesale and impartial destruction of masses of organisms of an early and lowly class, though not all of that unicellular group in which alone does Weismann fail to bring in selection as the deus ex machinâ.

This aspect of the subject gives "geological exterminations" a

living interest for the naturalist in addition to the other useful points raised in the paper.

Rev. G. F. WHIDBORNE, M.A., F.G.S.-I have read Dr. Warring's suggestive paper with very great interest. The extermination of species is self-evident, e.g., Spirifer, Pterodactyle, Ammonites, etc., must have been exterminated. That any living species is descended from them is unthinkable. The many monotremata are now reduced to two.

That at times extermination was synchronously predominant may also be predicated, without, of course, suggesting that it was at any time complete. There are often rapid disappearances of whole groups of species that never recur in the same profuseness again. At most continuance is accounted for by "survival of the fittest. But evidently that expression is intrinsically inaccurate; its meaning is intended to be "survival of the fittest in a modified form." Dr. Warring I understand tells us that the commonly suggested causes for these survivals are insufficient, and suggests three others of a chemical character. Whether these in turn are altogether adequate for the effects may perhaps be questioned. We have far the most evidence in geological history of sea animals. Their genealogy may be treated alone. Two of Dr. Warring's three causes practically vanish with regard to them. Atmosphere and soil could have had very slight and indirect effects upon them. We have then only the chemical change of the sea to account for their genealogy. Is it sufficient to have produced the evolution ascribed to it? For instance, the assumed excess of lime might be supposed to have resulted in more massive shells, but as an instance Spiriferina of the Oolites are, speaking generally, more massive than Spirifera of the Devonian. Devonian Gasteropods from Chudleigh, placed besides recent specimens of similar form, are almost similar in massiveness. But I in no way wish to suggest that Dr. Warring's three causes are not effective, but only that they are not in themselves fully adequate for the effects assigned them. They may come to the help of the other causes asserted to produce evolution; the result is that we get a still greater variety of assigned causes, and the advantage in Dr. Warring's causes is that a sequence in the causes is at least implied congruous with the sequence of effects, though insufficient in itself to account for them. But what Dr. Warring emphasises is that the sequence of effects is orderly, a

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