His address deals principally with two topics--one local, thermal springs, especially those of Bath; the other general, the glacial epoch and its relation to the antiquity of man. He refers, however, in the concluding paragraph to the marked change which, within his memory, opinion had undergone, in regard to catastrophic changes and the origin of species, and to the discovery of the supposed fossil _Eozoon Canadense_ in the crystalline Laurentian rocks of Canada. This singular structure appeared to him--as it did to Sir W. Logan, who had brought specimens for exhibition at the meeting--to be a fossil organism,[137] and thus to indicate the existence of living creatures at a much earlier period than hitherto had been supposed. But in stating this opinion he checks himself characteristically with these words: "I will not venture on speculations respecting 'the signs of a beginning,' or 'the prospects of an end' of our terrestrial system--that wide ocean of scientific conjecture on which so many theorists before my time have suffered shipwreck." The address contains more than one passage that is well worth quotation, but the following has so wide a bearing, and is so significant as to the effects of early influences, that it should not be forgotten:-- "When speculations on the long series of events which occurred in the Glacial and post-Glacial periods are indulged in, the imagination is apt to take alarm at the immensity of the time required to interpret the monuments of these ages, all referable to the era of existing species. In order to abridge the number of centuries which would otherwise be indispensable, a disposition is shown by many to magnify the rate of change in prehistoric times, by investing the causes which have modified the animate and inanimate world with extraordinary and excessive energy. It is related of a great Irish orator of our day, that when he was about to contribute somewhat parsimoniously towards a public charity, he was persuaded by a friend to make a more liberal donation. In doing so, he apologised for his first apparent want of generosity by saying that his early life had been a constant struggle with scanty means, and that 'they who are born to affluence cannot easily imagine how long a time it takes to get the chill of poverty out of one's bones.' In like manner, we of the living generation, when called upon to make grants of thousands of centuries in order to explain the events of what is called the modern period, shrink naturally at first from making what seems to be so lavish an expenditure of past time. Throughout our early education we have been accustomed to such strict economy in all that relates to the chronology of the earth and its inhabitants in remote ages, so fettered have we been by old traditional beliefs, that even when our reason is