were supposed to be
entrenched.

At the meeting of the British Association in 1879 I delivered an
address on "Degeneration: a Chapter in Darwinism." In the printed
version of that address, published in the same year, there are some
statements bearing on the matter above discussed which I reproduce
here, since I can still make them with conviction.

"Assuredly it cannot lower our conception of man's dignity if we have
to regard him as 'the flower of all the ages' bursting from the great
stream of life which has flowed on through countless epochs with one
increasing purpose, rather than as an isolated miraculous being, put
together abnormally from elemental clay, and cut off by such
portentous origin from his fellow animals and from that gracious
nature to whom he yearns with filial instinct, knowing her, in spite
of fables, to be his dear mother."

"A certain number of thoughtful persons admit the development of man's
body by natural processes from ape-like ancestry, but believe in the
non-natural intervention of a Creator at a certain definite stage in
that development, in order to introduce into the animal which was at
that moment a man-like ape, something called 'a conscious soul' in
virtue of which he became an ape-like man."

"No one ventures to deny, at the present day, that every human being
grows from the egg _in utero_, just as a dog or a monkey does; the
facts are before us and can be scrutinised in detail. We may ask of
those who refuse to admit the gradual and natural development of man's
consciousness in the ancestral series, passing from ape-like forms
into indubitable man, 'How do you propose to divide the series
presented by every individual man in his growth from the egg? At what
particular phase in the embryonic series is the soul with its
consciousness implanted? Is it in the egg? in the foetus of this
month or that? in the new-born infant? or at five years of age?' This,
it is notorious, is a point upon which churches have never been able
to agree; and it is equally notorious that the unbroken series
exists--that the egg becomes the foetus, the foetus the child, and
the child the man. On the other hand we have the historical
series--the series, the existence of which is inferred by Darwin and
his adherents. This is a series leading from simple egg-like organisms
to ape-like creatures, and from these to man. Will those who cannot
answer our previous inquiries undertake to assert dogmatically in t