Following the Palæolithic era, or rude stone age, is the Neolithic, or new stone, age; and now we find man using polished weapons, making pottery, using fire to warm himself with, and developing social manners. Instead of living in caves, he lived in lake dwellings, with others of his species, and gradually developed agricultural tastes. This metamorphosis, we know from the fossil remains found deposited in various strata, occupied a long period of time, probably thousands of years; and even then we are left thousands of years before the historical era, which followed the bronze and iron ages. Compare these men with those who lived in the Grecian and Egyptian eras, and again compare these latter with ourselves, and the record is one of trial and failure through long ages, and of experiment crowned at last by attainment. Has not the invention of the steam-engine alone been a means of extending man’s dominion in a marvellous manner? Think what has been achieved through electricity! There has, undoubtedly, been a continued struggle from barbarism to civilisation, and the little we know of the early history of man tells us that he lived the life of a wild beast, leaving no impression on the earth save one of the victims of his well-aimed stone or flint-pointed spear. So much for the “missing link.” There is one other point to be settled before we have completed the sequence of evolution, which commences with the condensation of the nebulous vapour and terminates with the development of man; and that is the question of how life originated. We have found that the first dawn of life was in the form of a simple speck of bioplasm, void of any structure; and that this primordial germ, which we call a Moneron, was developed in the earliest period of deposition of stratified rock at the bottom of the sea, and is now being constantly developed as of old. Now, if the theory of evolution be not mere talk, this primordial germ must have been spontaneously evolved from inanimate matter, for the theory allows of no break, being a gradual unfolding of phenomena. We are told that there is no experience in nature of such a development. Perhaps so; but that is no argument against it. There is no experience in nature of any special creation either; so why fly to this alternative, which is the only one presented to us, instead of adopting the theory which agrees so harmoniously with the whole evolutionary process? Why make this abrupt break in the chain of sequence? Does it not annihilate completely the whole theory of evolution? It is not more wonderful that life should be evolved from inanimate nature than that man should be evolved from a structureless bioplasm. The continuity of evolution once broken, why may it not be broken again and again?