672 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the Home Department, granted under the authority of the vivisection 

 net. 



So it comes about that, in this present year of grace 1877, two 

 persons may be charged with cruelty to animals. One has impaled 

 a frog, and suffered the creature to writhe about in that condition for 

 hours; the other has pained the animal no more than one of us would 

 be pained by tying strings round his fingers, and keej^ing him in the 

 position of an hydropathic patient. The first offender says, " I did it 

 because I find fishing very amusing," and the magistrate bids him de- 

 part in peace; nay, probably wishes him good sport. The second 

 pleads, " I wanted to impress a scientific truth, with a distinctness at- 

 tainable in no other way, on the minds of my scholars," and the magis- 

 trate fines him five pounds. 



I cannot but think that this is an anomalous and not wholly credit- 

 able state of things. Nature. 



-- 



COSMIC AND OKGANIC EYOLUTIOK 



By LESTER F. WARD, A. M. 



ryiHE evolution of a world is not obviously identical with the evolu- 

 -J- tion of an organism. From one point of view they may be re- 

 garded as, to a certain extent, opposite processes. Fully understood, 

 they are different manifestations of one process, affected by very dif- 

 ferent circumstances. Regarding each as an aggregate which must 

 equally run its course, the special histories of the two are quite un- 

 like. The history of every aggregate consists of two parts, a rise and 

 a. decline. It has its period of growth and its period of decadence. 

 The first consists in a gradual progress from a diffused toward a con- 

 centrated state ; the second is the return from the concentrated to 

 the diffused state. The process involved in the first period is the 

 integration of the matter of the aggregate, and the dissipation of its 

 motion. In the second period this process is reversed : its matter is 

 disintegrated, and motion is evolved. The first of these processes is 

 termed evolution ; the second, dissolution. In theory this is identical 

 in all aggregates, and therefore the life-history of a plant is the same 

 as that of a star. 



But, while we may trace and understand the process in the former 

 of these aggregates, and may declare such to be its law as the result 

 of more or less accurate experimental proof, this is not the case with 

 the latter. We see the varied forms of life spring into being and 

 vanish out of being. We may watch them during their entire his- 

 tory, from the moment when they emerge from the imperceptible to 

 that in which they are again lost in the imperceptible. We can ob- 



