726 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



determine the growth of a plant or animal are physical forces ; any 

 assumption to the contrary, remember, even Dr. Beale avows that 

 "we can not in any way prove." Why can not physical forces, in 

 this case as in others, originate what they develop ? It is for him 

 who denies that they can do both or either to show why. This has 

 never been done ; and, till that which Dr. Beale admits to be un- 

 provable is proved, never will be. The denial is a bald negation, 

 leaving the presumption to stand, like the allied one, strengthened by 

 a fruitless contradiction. 



But we are not left to philosophical presumptions, insurmountable 

 though they are. The evolution of living from not-living matter, it 

 should be borne in mind, is an essential part of the hypothesis of evolu- 

 tion at large, and shares evenly in all the evidence, direct and indirect, 

 which supports the general hypothesis, and which, against rooted pre- 

 dispositions of every kind, and amid the continual uproar of detrac- 

 tion and abuse, has revolutionized the thought of our time, putting 

 Dr. Beale and his school of thinkers, but lately in an overwhelming 

 majority, in a minority that he fairly terms a "very small number," 

 and taking the chair of authority, as he ruefully complains, not simply 

 in the laboratory and the closet, but in the study and the school, and, 

 he might have added by "prophetic assumption," the Church, that 

 loving mother of most of us beginning dimly to perceive that evolu- 

 tion founds science and religion on the self-same basis, and, in place 

 of being the enemy of either, is the truest friend of both. The evi- 

 dence which, in the course of a single generation, has wrought this 

 marvelous change in unwilling minds, and the more distinctly in the 

 higher minds, goes in its full strength, I repeat, to support the special 

 hypothesis in hand. Manifestly, the leaders of thought, in both hemi- 

 spheres, estimate this evidence differently from Dr. Beale. It is truly 

 irresistible to an open and enlightened mind. 



Furthermore, the earth, we should not forget, is her own biogra- 

 pher ; and in the geologic chapter of her authentic sketch is recorded 

 a time when life did not exist within her limits. Life on the earth 

 had a beginning, then. This is not denied. Nor is it denied that up 

 to the beginning of life all terrestrial phenomena were the effects of 

 physical forces. 



So much is conceded by every one, Dr. Beale not excepted. And, 

 now came life. Whence did it come ? Whence does it come ? 

 Physical forces, undeniably, are the constant antecedents of life ; 

 which, moreover, varies in fixed correspondence with determinate 

 variations in them. This Dr. Beale must likewise concede, or assail 

 the foundations of his art. But it is an axiom in scientific inquiry 

 that anything, upon whose variations the variations of an effect are 

 uniformly consequent, is the cause or connected with the cause of that 

 effect ; and, since the physical forces accompanying life are connected 

 with no other cause except the Ultimate Cause, it results that they 



