more clearly than the members of the highest order of mammals. Either these homologies are real and thus show the existence of a real bond of union, or else they are mere mockeries like the face in the pansy flower. If homologies are mockeries, then indeed our science. has made no progress, for this was the belief of the middle ages.

So much for what we know. Our objections to recognising our kinship with the lower forms-if we have any such objections-rest on considerations outside the domain of knowledge. They do not rest on religious grounds. Those who think so deceive themselves. "Secondary causes," as the phrase is used, belong to the province of science. They are outside the domain of religion. "Theology and science," says Darwin, "should each run its own course. . . . I am not responsible if their meeting point should still be far off."

This is not a question of preference one way or another. Personal preference has no place in science. Man was not present at the foundation of the world. It is not a question to be decided one way or another by a majority vote. Truth cares nothing for majorities, and the majority of one age may be the wonder or the shame of the next.

The only question is this: Is it true? And if it be the truth, nothing in the universe can be truer.

Decaying scientific beliefs.

"Ex

tinguished theologians," Huxley tells us, "lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of the infant Hercules." Looking along the history of human thought, we see the attempt to fasten to Christianity each decaying belief in science. Every failing scientific notion has claimed orthodoxy for itself. That the earth is round, that it moves about the sun, that it is old, that granite ever was melted-all these beliefs, now

part of our common knowledge, have been declared contrary to religion, and Christian men who knew these things to be true have suffered all manner of evil for their sake. We see the hand of the Almighty in Nature everywhere; but everywhere he works with law and order. We have found that even comets have orbits; that valleys were dug out by water, and hills worn down by ice; and all that we have ever known to be done on earth has been done in accordance with law.

Darwin says: "To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and exDarwin's words. tinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of an individual. When I view all beings, not as special creations, but as lineal descendants of some few beings who lived before the first bed of the Silurian was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.

"There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one, and that while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed. law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved."

The conception of God.

With the growth of the race has steadily grown our conception of the omnipotence of God. Our ancestors. felt, as many races of men still feel, that they were forsaken unless each household had a god of its own, for, numerous as the greater gods were, they were busy with priests and kings. The people could hardly believe that the God of their tribe could be the God of the Gentiles also. That he could dwell in temples not made

with hands, removed him from human sight. That there could be two continents was deemed impossible, for one God could not watch them both. That the earth was the central and sole inhabited planet rested on the same limited conception of God. That the beginning of all things was a little while ago is another phase of the same idea, as is the idea of special creation for every form of animal and plant.

A Chinese sage, whose words remain while his name is lost in the ages between him and us, has said: “He can not be concealed; he will appear without showing himself, effect renovation without moving, and create perfection without acting. It is the law of heaven and earth, whose way is solid, substantial, vast, and unchanging."

Darwin's home.

Not long ago I walked across the Kentish fields to Down, a pilgrim to the shrine of Darwin. I saw the stately mansion in which he lived-a great stone house surrounded by trees and shut in by an ivy-covered wall. I talked with the villagers of Down, the landlord of the George Inn, and the working people who had been his neighbours all their lives, and to whom Charles Darwin was not the worldrenowned investigator, but the kindly friend. His love for his wife and family, his love for flowers and birds and trees, his love for all things true and beautiful—all this forms the fair background before which rises the noblest work in science.

Forty years ago obloquy and derision were heaped upon the name of Darwin from all sides, sometimes even from his scientific associates. He outlived it all, and when he died his mother country paid him the highest tribute in her power. He lies in Westminster Abbey, by the side of Isaac Newton, one of the noblest of the long line of men of science whose lives have made his own

life possible. For every truth that is won for humanity takes the life of a man.

Among all who have written or spoken of Darwin since he died, by none has an unkind word been said. His was a gentle, patient, and reverent spirit, and by his life has not only science but our conception of Christianity been advanced and ennobled.

"A sacred kinship I would not forego

Binds me to all that breathes; through endless strife
The calm and deathless dignity of life

Unites each bleeding victim to its foe.

"I am the child of earth and air and sea.

My lullaby by hoarse Silurian storms

Was chanted, and through endless changing forms
Of tree and bird and beast unceasingly

The toiling ages wrought to fashion me.

"Lo! these large ancestors have left a breath
Of their great souls in mine, defying death
And change. I grow and blossom as the tree,
And ever feel deep-delving earthy roots
Binding me daily to the common clay;
Yet with its airy impulse upward shoots
My soul into the realms of light and day.
And thou, O sea, stern mother of my soul,
Thy tempests ring in me, thy billows roll!"

HJALMAR HJORTH BOYESEN.

II.

EVOLUTION: WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT IS NOT.

What evolution is.

THIS is the age of evolution. The word is used by many men in many senses, and still oftener perhaps in. no sense at all. By some it is spoken with a haunting dread, as though it were another name for the downfall of religion and of social stability. Still others speak it glibly and joyously, as though progress and freedom were secured by the mere use of the name. "The word evolution (Entwickelung)," says a German writer, "fills the vocal cords more perfectly than any other word." It explains everything and "puts the key to the universe into one's vest pocket."

So various has been the use of the word, so rarely is this use associated with any definite idea, that one hesitates to call himself an evolutionist. "Evolution" and "evolutionist" are almost ready to be cast into that "limbo of spoiled phraseology" which Matthew Arnold has found necessary for so many words in which other generations delighted and which they soiled or spoiled by careless usage.

But as the word evolution is not yet put away, as it is the bugbear of many good people and the "religion of as many more equally good, it may be worth while to consider what it still means and what it does not mean, for if we that use the word can agree on a definition half our quarrel is over.