to date in making organic life in our
laboratories out of inorganic materials. The gulf between the dead and
the living was something which our chemistry could not as yet bridge.
But there was a higher and subtler chemistry of Nature, which, working
with great forces over long epochs, might well produce results which
were impossible for us. There the matter must be left.

This brought the lecturer to the great ladder of animal life, beginning
low down in molluscs and feeble sea creatures, then up rung by rung
through reptiles and fishes, till at last we came to a kangaroo-rat, a
creature which brought forth its young alive, the direct ancestor of
all mammals, and presumably, therefore, of everyone in the audience.
("No, no," from a sceptical student in the back row.) If the young
gentleman in the red tie who cried "No, no," and who presumably claimed
to have been hatched out of an egg, would wait upon him after the
lecture, he would be glad to see such a curiosity. (Laughter.) It was
strange to think that the climax of all the age-long process of Nature
had been the creation of that gentleman in the red tie. But had the
process stopped? Was this gentleman to be taken as the final type--the
be-all and end-all of development? He hoped that he would not hurt the
feelings of the gentleman in the red tie if he maintained that,
whatever virtues that gentleman might possess in private life, still
the vast processes of the universe were not fully justified if they
were to end entirely in his production. Evolution was not a spent
force, but one still working, and even greater achievements were in
store.

Having thus, amid a general titter, played very prettily with his
interrupter, the lecturer went back to his picture of the past, the
drying of the seas, the emergence of the sand-bank, the sluggish,
viscous life which lay upon their margins, the overcrowded lagoons, the
tendency of the sea creatures to take refuge upon the mud-flats, the
abundance of food awaiting them, their consequent enormous growth.
"Hence, ladies and gentlemen," he added, "that frightful brood of
saurians which still affright our eyes when seen in the Wealden or in
the Solenhofen slates, but which were fortunately extinct long before
the first appearance of mankind upon this planet."

"Question!" boomed a voice from the platform.

Mr. Waldron was a strict disciplinarian with a gift of acid humor, as
exemplified upon the gentleman with the red