462 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



When the Japanese embassadors visited the United States, it was 

 remarked that the manners of the most refined men among them were 

 essentially European or American, if we choose so to state it ; not 

 that they were in the smallest particular borrowed or assumed, but 

 because there is a logic in the culture of the human being, that brings 

 about the same results all the world over, so far as manners are con- 

 cerned. The style of Marcus Antoninus has this cosmopolitan air. 

 He seems to have been the really complete ideal of a cultivated man ; 

 and his ways of thinking, his methods of expression, his social views, 

 his manners, in fact, are correspondingly broad. 



He would be at home in any century; but in none so completely, 

 it seems to me, as in the nineteenth. You long to hear of his intro- 

 duction to Darwin and Sjjencer, and feel that the conversation would 

 grow interesting at once. The deeply-rooted doctrine of special cre- 

 ation is, we know, now losing force day by day, for all who have the 

 opportunity to become acquainted with the current results of scientific 

 investigation, even in a superficial, popular way. The invention of a 

 matured animal is seen to be inconceivable, because all the facts that 

 appertain to the idea of maturity are so definitely associated with the 

 recognition of advancing age, that the conceptions are found to be 

 inseparable. One of the scientific puzzles has therefore been to ac- 

 count in an intelligent manner for the different phases of life that 

 occur from age to age ; to suggest, as it were, some positive vehicle 

 whose duty it has been to carry along the sequence of influences from 

 generation to generation. Draper makes a suggestion in this direc- 

 tion, and points out that the air xoe hreathe is the grand receptacle 

 from which all living things come, and to which they all return. It 

 is, he says, the cradle of vegetable, the coffin of animal life : made up 

 of atoms that have once lived, and that have run through innumer- 

 able cycles of change, its particles await their turn for further re- 

 organization. A corresponding thought also appears to have passed 

 through the mind of Antoninus ; not, of course, precisely in the same 

 form, but there is an intelligible hint of the idea in the following sen- 

 tence: " If souls continue to exist, how does the air contain them from 

 eternity ? " 



Every era has what may be called its fashionable real problem for 

 discussion. Sometimes it is ethical ; at others, mechanical ; or it may 

 be artistic. 



The recognition of a process of development in all things or, as 

 it is well termed, " evohition " is the essential natural law which 

 seems just now to be the important centre of scientific interest; and 

 it may almost be said to be an outgrowth of the present decade. Yet 

 in our author we see the same kind of yeast fermenting, and becoming 

 an incisive statement in appropriate words. " Observe constantly 

 that all things take ])lace by change. Accustom yourself to consider 

 that the nature of the universe loves nothins; so much as to chano-e 



