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..

WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT IS NOT.

55

It seems to me that the word evolution is now legitimately used in four different senses. It is the name of a branch of science; it is a theory of organic existence; it is a method of investigation; and it is the basis of a system of philosophy.

The science of organic evolution.

As a science, evolution is the study of changing beings acted upon by unchanging laws. It is a matter of common observation that organisms change from day to day, and that day by day some alteration in their environment is produced. It is a conclusion from scientific investigation that these changes are greater than they appear. They affect not only the individual animal or plant, but they affect all groups of living things, classes or races or species. No character is permanent, no trait of life without change; and as the living organism and groups of organisms are undergoing alteration, so does change take place in the objects of the physical world about them. "Nothing endures," says Huxley, "save the flow of energy and the rational order that pervades it." The structures and objects change their forms and relations, and to forms and relations once abandoned they never return; but the methods of change are, so far as we can see, immutable. The laws of life, the laws of death, and the laws of matter never change. If the invisible forces which rule all visible things are themselves subject to modification and evolution we have not detected it. If these vary, their aberrations are so fine as to defy human observation and computation. In the control of the universe we find no trace of "variableness nor shadow of turning." "It is the law of heaven and earth, whose way is solid, substantial, vast, and unchanging."

But the things we know do not endure. Only the shortness of human life allows us to speak of species or

even of individuals as permanent entities. The mountain chain is no more nearly eternal than the drift of sand. It endures beyond the period of human observation; it antedates and outlasts human history. So does the species of animal or plant outlast and antedate the lifetime of one man. Its changes are slight even in the lifetime of the race. Thus the species, through the persistence of its type among its changing individuals, comes to be regarded as something which is beyond modification, unchanging so long as it exists.

"I believe," said the rose to the lily in the parable, "I believe that our gardener is immortal. I have watched him from day to day since I bloomed, and I see no change in him. The tulip who died yesterday told me the same thing."

As a flash of lightning in the duration of the night, so is the life of man in the duration of Nature. When one looks out on a storm at night he sees for an instant the landscape illumined by the lightning flash. All seems at rest. The branches in the wind, the flying clouds, the falling rain, are all motionless in this instantaneous view. The record on the retina takes no account of change, and to the eye the change does not exist. Brief as the lightning flash in the storm is the life of man compared with the great time record of life upon earth. To the untrained man who has not learned to read these records, species and types in life are enduring. From this illusion arose the theory of special creation and permanence of type, a theory which could not persist when the fact of change and the forces causing it came to be studied in detail.

But when man came to investigate the facts of individual variation and to think of their significance, the current of life no longer seemed at rest. Like the flow of a mighty river, ever sweeping steadily on, never re