Principal Dawson, in his Minneapolis address, makes a temperate, but powerful protest against modern views of evolution. He goes to the beginning and comes toward us, while those whom he antagonizes start from the other end. He contends that geology shows in its earliest palaeontological remains as perfect development in some of the earliest known creatures as there is at the present time, and that so far as research has yet been successful there are no known forms from which these beings could have sprung. In other lectures Dr. Dawson has shown that the oldest human crania yet discovered show as great a state of human development as could be gathered from a knowledge of any human skull of to-day; and again he contends that some of the earliest fossil plants have almost their exact counterparts in existing species, and that the supposed law of perpetual change is controverted by these instances. It is very difficult to eject Dr. Dawson from this chosen field. Philosophy might desire to ask him if he believes a pair of each species were created as adults, and then turned loose to increase and multiply; and whether in view of the carnivorous habits of many of them, numbers would not be obliterated before the species were barely born; or, if a number of individuals of one species were to come suddenly into existence as adults, whether geological science has indicated the probability of any law existing at that time by which such an event might be brought about? From the mere scientific standpoint, and aside from revelation, Principal Dawson could at best but answer, that he did not know.

But the evolutionist who starts from the modern end, points to the facts about him and shows that there is change now, and that what would surely be regarded as species, did we not know their origin, have been derived from a common stock, and that these variations once introduced, have all the powers of permanent reproduction which the best recognized species have. In this column it is the object merely to indicate the lines of scientific progress. As it seems to us, scientists of the Dawson school simply say, we cannot say how, looking at the dawn of life, species first came to exist; while the evolutionist says that, looking at the present day, we can. - Independent.