692 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



indefatigable courage. But there are also thicker and heavier stones, 

 without beauty or apparent grace, which are designed to be hidden 

 at the base of an immense edifice, like the massive columns with 

 which the architects of the middle ages decorated the crypts of their 

 Gothic cathedrals. It is truth in the rough. He does not impose his 

 condition, but communicates it and proves it. If it is certain, he 

 affirms it; when he supposes, he says so; when he doubts, he acknowl- 

 edges it." She then passes to the exposition of Darwinism as re- 

 sponding to one of the noblest aspirations of the mind, the prelimi- 

 nary step to the accounting for the world of organized beings, as 

 astronomy, physics, and geology have explained the origin of inani- 

 mate substances. In effect, the illustrious Englishman, connecting 

 the domain of botany and zoology with the action of second causes, 

 sought first to comprehend the genesis, and then the evolution, in 

 the same way that astronomers and geologists teach us concerning the 

 origin of our globe and the successive phases through which its sur- 

 face has passed. 



Not only did Madame Clemence Royer initiate us into trans- 

 formism. In her masterly introduction she went still further. Car- 

 rying the exposition to its final consequences, she provoked a useful 

 revolution in the ideas then current. She dared to say what many 

 men of science would only have left to be inferred. Her translation, 

 revealing the name of Darwin to the French public, who hardly knew 

 of it at that period, gave the occasion for a very active conflict between 

 the partisans of " creationism " and the Nantese philosophy. The suc- 

 cess of this work was so great as to induce her to complete her preface 

 by publishing a few years afterward a work wholly her own, Origine 

 de VHomme et des Societes (Origin of Man and Societies, 1870), 

 which, being her best production, deserves a special analysis. With 

 the assistance of documents collected by the most famous anthropolo- 

 gists, Madame Royer reconstitutes the history of the primitive ages 

 of mankind, and after studying its origins and development she seeks 

 for the bonds that connect the great human family with the rest of 

 living Nature ; and finally forecasts its future from its past. 



In the first part she takes up the question of the origin of life 

 and of its transformations upon the earth. The living species are 

 grouped around man, who is the topmost shoot of the gigantic " tree 

 of life." Two laws regulate the transmission of life — the law of 

 heredity and the law of variability. The former assures the continua- 

 tion of the type, and the latter variety in its modifications. The 

 organic kingdom as a whole oscillates between these two contrary 

 rules which fix limits each upon the other and which suffice to explain 

 the successive appearance through the ages of different forms of life. 

 The organic individual is thus the solution of a problem in algebra 



