F. Howard Mason, secretary of the Buffalo Chamber of Commerce, who has gone thoroughly into the lake and canal transportation problem, estimates that with the barge canal, grain can be profitably loaded at Chicago or Milwaukee and landed in New York for 3.5 cents per bushel. He apportions the rate thus: lake freight, 1.5; elevator charges, 2 cent; canal freight 1.5 cents. Thomas M. Ryan, for twenty-five years a large shipper from Buffalo by canal, estimates the Chicago-New York rate at 3 cents and says that larger lake carrying vessels, larger canal barges and improved motive power for the latter will make the low rate possible.

It is confidently expected by the state authorities in charge of the barge canal work that a type of barge will be developed that can navigate the lakes, the canal, and land its cargo anywhere on the Atlantic coast in America. Gasoline is being talked of as the coming fuel for the propulsion of canal barges.

Work on the barge canal is now being pushed at six different places. The methods of canal building in use are in striking contrast with those of 1817, when the original canal was dug. A Pittsburg firm which has the heaviest contract on the entire line of the canal in amount of excavation is granted three years by the state in which to complete the 3.28 miles of canal. This contract is three miles west of Rochester, and electric wires from the city convey current for lighting the operations at night. Earth is taken out at the rate of 65,000 yards a month of 26 working days. This firm estimates that its contract will be completed in two years from the beginning, June 1 last.

An invention of the late Harold A. Boedker, of Chicago, who was prominent in the engineering work of the Chicago drainage canal, will be used on this contract. This machine, costing $100,000, is designed to seize a heap of blasted rock, elevate the large load and carry it beyond the range of work. Electricity will be the motive power. By way of contrasting old canalmaking methods with present, it may be stated that 60 men, with machin

ery, excavate as much now in 24 hours. as was excavated by 400 men on the original Erie Canal.

The course of the barge canal takes it through 170 miles of earth and rock, 107 miles of canalized rivers and 68 miles of open water. From Buffalo the canal will follow the present line of the Erie to Lyons, about 100 miles, with the exception of a new course taking it out of the city of Rochester. From near Lyons a new channel will lead to Oneida Lake, which is to be utilized. From the east end of Oneida Lake, Wood Creek, enlarged, will be made use of and, with a new channel, will connect with the Mohawk River, which will be canalized to Waterford on the Hudson.

Through the earth section, the canal will be 75 feet wide at the bottom, 123 feet wide at the water line and 133 feet at top of banks. In sections where the canal will be through rock, it will be 94 feet wide at the bottom and 96 feet at the top. The rocky sides will be smoothed. Through the great Montezuma marsh the channel will be 200 feet wide.

The 38 locks in the entire course of the canal will be each 300 feet long, 45 feet wide and have 14 feet of water over their sills. This size of locks will allow barges now plying the Soulanges Canal to use the New York route. They will enter the barge canal through the Niagara River from Buffalo to Tonawanda and after leaving the canal at Waterford will follow the Hudson for about 160 miles to New York.

Spurs of the barge canal will be built. into the largest two interior cities, Rochester and Syracuse. The Syracuse spur will connect with Lake Ontario at Oswego and such barges as can stand the rough seas of that lake can take that course to the Atlantic seaboard.

It is hoped that the success of New York's barge canal will obviate any necessity for the proposed thirty-foot waterway from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, via the St. Lawrence. That it will turn the atrophy of New York's export grain trade to a healthy growth is one of the great hopes of its friends.

HE old belief that living things first appeared upon the surface of the earth owing to miraculous agency, and that all the various species which subsequently appeared have owed their origin to a similar supernatural agency, is now commonly known as the "Special Creative Hypothesis." It is a notion no longer entertained by the majority of scientific men, because of the absence, as they believe, of all strict evidence for the occurrence of miracles of any kind, either now or in the past. This old view has been displaced by what is known as the "Evolution Hypothesis." And it is commonly believed by those who favor this hypothesis, that as the surface of the earth cooled down sufficiently to admit of various chemical affinities coming into play, living matter must have been formed by natural synthetic processes, gradually leading to the production of more and more complex compounds, till at last those combinations which we know as living matter made their appearance. Some have been willing to believe that this took place at one time and site only -by a quasi-miraculous process. Others see no reason for any such restriction and think that the process being natural and non-miraculous must have occurred in many sites at the same time, and that it

must have recurred at many periodsthat is in many past ages-though it may now have ceased to recur. Others stillthough they are comparatively few-believe that if living matter originally came into existence by natural processes, there is nothing to show that such processes have not been operative in all past ages since the time when they first began, nor that such processes do not continue to the present day.

Neither one of these views in regard to the past can be supported by any positive evidence. The history of early changes on the earth's surface is absolutely beyond our ken.

Many men of science, while perfectly willing to postulate the natural origin of living matter in the past rather than accept belief in miracles, have been willing to believe, though without adequate evidence, that the natural affinities and conditions which led to its production in the past have now ceased to be operative.

Several things have, however, to be borne in mind which will, as the writer hopes to show, be found fully to justify this statement as to the absence of adequate evidence for a belief in the cessation of the natural production of living matter.

In the first place the whole history of science tends to show the uniformity of natural phenomena-that everything which goes on in the universe, so far as

we have been able to ascertain, takes place as we are accustomed to say in accordance with fixed "laws." It is the prevalence of this uniformity which has gradually displaced in the minds of men of science anything like a belief in miracles or supernatural causes, hence the disbelief in the creation of living matter, and the belief in its becoming, its origin, that is, by natural causes. This being so, it seems only logical to suppose that the causes originally operative for the production of living matter would have continued to exist through all past ages, and should still continue to be in operation. The properties and chemical tendencies of material bodies appear to be quite constant through both time and space, and no one has attempted to show that there were any forces or sets of conditions existing on the surface of the earth at the time when they assume living matter to have first come into being, different from what may be operative at the present day. On the contrary, it might with much show of reason be assumed to have been more difficult for living matter to come into being then than now, seeing that the nonvital organic products derived from preexisting living things which are now everywhere widely dispersed, would then have been absent.

If positive evidence that living matter has ceased to come into being independently and by natural processes is wholly wanting, how comes it that so many men of science are content to believe in this particular discontinuity? There are, the writer believes, two principal reasons for this state of things.

It has been said over and over again that a present-day de novo or natural origin of living matter is contrary to the experience of all mankind-that we see everywhere living things coming only from pre-existing living things. That is perfectly true in regard to the question of the origin of all the living things that come under our observation: but it is absolutely devoid of all cogency in reference to the question of the de novo origin of living matter, seeing that the origin of living matter, like the origin of crys tals, can only take place in fluid or in semi-fluid media, and that in each case the initial molecular combinations would lie far beyond

ion of the visible, even

were the observer aided by the most powerful microscope ever made.

Suppose we admit that absolute proof, by experiments, has not yet been brought testifying to the de novo origin of living matter at the present day; to decline to admit that absolute proof exists of the present-day origin of living matter is one thing; but in face of all the difficulties as to origination and as to proof, under experimental conditions, it may well be asked: Are we on this account warranted in assuming that living matter is not now constantly originating de novo under conditions more favorable for such a process? This view seems to be the real heresy, since to adopt it is to assume, without a scrap of evidence, a break in the continuity of natural phenomena for which no reason has ever been alleged. The occurrence, whenever it takes place, is one which must always elude the observation of men. It may now be taking place all over the face of the earth in favorable media, and yet this most subtle process will reveal itself to no one.

This formation of living matter by a process of synthesis from its primitive elements, to which we have just been referring, is what I term archebiosis. The living matter so arising, in the form of minute particles, is assumed to speedily develop into one or other kind of the lowest living things. Similar living things may, however, originate de novo in another way, known as heterogenesis. Thus in archebiosis we are presumed to have to do with the actual origin of living matter, and its subsequent speedy development into living things of different kinds; while in heterogenesis we are presumed to have to do with transformations of already existing living matter, and a consequent de novo birth of alien living things.

If all the forms of life that have ever existed upon the surface of the earth have been derived from the primordial forms which first took origin by natural synthetic processes in an incalculably remote past, no adequate and consistent explanation would be forthcoming of the undoubted existence, at the present day, of the teeming multitudes of such lower organisms as have been referred to. For if the assumed gradual development of higher forms of life during all past

geologic ages has been largely due to the intrinsic mutability of living matter, as the evolution hypothesis assumes, would it not be a stultification of that hypothesis to suppose that such primordial forms as bacteria, torulae, monads, amoebae and ciliated infusoria have remained practically unchanged and in these low grades for untold millions of years?

As the writer long ago pointed out, persistence of low types of life is much more explicable on "the assumption of successive evolutions of more or less similar forms from similar starting points under the influence of like conditions, than on the assumption that such changeable forms should have continued to produce their like through such vast and unrealizable epochs of time." Persistence of types among lower forms of life is, in fact, to be expected in accordance with the newer views, seeing that the living things that are assumed to have been constantly arising by archebiosis and heterogenesis have been the immediate products of ever-acting material properties and natural laws, the same in all times, however much or little the environing conditions may have varied from age to age.

Thus the continued recurrence of low types throughout the geologic strata from the Silurian system upward; and, among higher types, the constant admixture of previously known forms with others altogether new, will be found quite consistent with the notion of a continual surging up through all geologic time of freshly evolved, lower forms of life, representatives of which, as they become more and more highly organized, mix, in successive epochs, with those of their predecessors which still remain. There would thus always be a continual striving onward of old and new alike, toward those highest goals which the direction of development and the sum-total of surrounding conditions at the time rendered possible.

What has just been said will be found. to have a very important bearing upon another problem of great speculative interest, namely, the question of the time needful for the evolution of all the forms of life that have appeared upon earth. It is well known that this is a problem to which very different answers have been given by physicists, by geologists and biologists respectively. The time that could be conceded by Lord Kelvin (that is something less than forty millions of years) was thought to be hopelessly too short by Darwin. And this same doctrine was more strongly and explicitly announced by Professor Poulton. He seemed to consider that many hundred millions of years would be needed to account for the evolution of all the different forms of life that have appeared upon the globe.

One of the principal reasons that induced Darwin to think it needful to make extremely large demands upon time is to be found in his view that low forms of life change or become modified less quickly than the higher forms.

If instead of believing with Darwin that "all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those that lived long before the Cambrian epoch," and that "all the organic beings that have ever lived on this earth may be descended from some one primordial form," it should be admitted that life originally started from multitudes of centers (as the uniformity of natural phenomena would demand); that from the earliest stages of the earth's history up to the present time new starting points of simplest forms (by archebiosis as well as by heterogenesis) have been ever taking place all over the surface of the earth, we may see, not only how many of the facts concerning "persistent types" may be explained, but also how the time needed for the whole evolution of life upon the globe may have been far less prolonged than most biologists have hitherto supposed.

DAVID STARR JORDAN

President Leland Stanford, Jr., University

1. No one knows what length of time is necessary for the processes of evolution. We have no adequate measure, and opinions vary very widely as to the yardsticks we try to use. Geologists are equally far from agreement, and for analogous reasons. We know that in some groups forms change more quickly than in others, and we have some slight measures in geological time of the period of endurance of some species. But the whole matter of time is still in the guesswork period, except as to the relative succession of events. If we knew that the time had been as short as the forty million years allowed by Lord Kelvin, we could trim our theories of evolution to match.

2. We can only answer this by saying (1) that we have no present evidence that living matter is now formed from nonliving matter. Dr. Bastian's early experiments, not accompanied by adequate care to exclude germs, or by adequate recognition of our present knowledge of the life histories of infusoria, bacteria and fungi are regarded as of little value by skilled experimenters. So far as any one has yet found out, every cell comes from a cell, all life from life.

(2) But this is inconclusive. If life is really generated from non-life, we have reason to believe that it would not appear in specialized forms like infusoria, but in groups of molecules so small that we could not find them, so simple that we could not recognize them. We might expect them to compare to a drop of water as a clam to the ocean.

(3) The fact that all lines of life on earth are joined together by homologies, diverging like branches of a tree, is an argument that all life sprang from one stock. This again is not conclusive, though it offers a rational explanation of present conditions.

(4) The theory of evolution allows for forms quiescent or degenerating as well as for forms progressing. There is no inherent reason why a group of low organization should not persist little changed for thousands of centuries. Specialized

forms are adapted to varied conditions of life, and natural selection forces rapid change.

Adaptation is the essential fact in evolution, not progress or change.

(5) We know nothing whatever of the origin of life. Speculation "darkens counsel."

and Shark Jordan

JACOB REIGHARD

Professor of Zoology, University of Michigan

1. Eminent geologists and physicists, Lord Kelvin, G. Darwin, Helmholtz and others, have by various methods calculated that the time which has elapsed since the earth became habitable must be between twenty and forty million years. It is remarkable that the results obtained by different methods should agree as well as they do. The selection theory seemed to Darwin to need a longer time for the production of existing animals and plants. This was one of Darwin's difficulties. At the present time many evolutionists are taking refuge in the mutation theory of Hugo De Vries. According to this theory new species are produced, not by the long-continued addition of small variations, but at a single bound. On this theory the time allowed by physicists and geologists is ample for the evolution of the existing fauna and flora, without the aid of “archebiosis.”

2. That eels were produced from mud and flies from decaying flesh was formerly commonly believed, even by scientific men. That bacteria and other microorganisms might originate spontaneously was later held by the opponents of Pasteur. Wherever such alleged cases have been investigated by rigid scientific methods, they have been shown to be without foundation. As methods of investigation have been refined, the number of alleged cases of spontaneous generation has lessened. There are now none which scientific men credit. I do not see how any one can deny the possibility of such origin at the present time. But in the absence