824 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



penter, but a creator — KTiarrjf ou Te^i/m;?. In the beginning he 

 created all things and then impressed on them the power of de- 

 velopment, of evolving into the innumerable species we now behold. 

 All things existed in idea before they existed in fact, and the design 

 and purpose which are revealed in animate and inanimate Nature 

 are the witnesses of the foresight and providence of creative wisdom. 

 Paley and the older school of teleologists pointed to a watch as 

 a beautiful and convincing evidence of design. To the modern 

 teleologist, studying the universe in the light of evolution, it is not 

 simply a watch that presents itself as a witness of purpose running 

 through all things created, from atom to star, but it is a watch 

 which is competent to produce other and better watches. God 

 makes things, it is true, but he makes them by making them 

 make themselves. Similarly, we read purpose in Nature not only 

 by limiting our view to the present and to simple individuals, but 

 also, and more particularly, by studying the species and the class 

 to which individuals belong, in the light of their past history or in 

 the changes they may undergo in the future by reason of varied 

 conditions or continued development. In the words of Mr. Aubrey 

 L. Moore : " If ontogeny, the history of the individual, gives us no 

 answer, we fall back on phylogeny, the history of the race. Organs, 

 which on the old theory of special creations were useless and mean- 

 ingless, are now seen to have their explanation in the past or in the 

 future, according as they are rudimentary or nascent. There is 

 nothing useless, nothing meaningless in Nature, nothing due to 

 caprice or chance, nothing irrational or without a cause, nothing 

 outside the reign of law. This belief in the universality of the reign 

 of law is the scientific analogue of the Christian's belief in Provi- 

 dence." * 



The principal feature in the orography of South America, from Cape 

 Horn northward, says Mr. Otto Nordenskjold, in describing his journey in 

 southwestern Patagonia, is the contrast between a bigh Pacific mountain 

 chain and a wide Atlantic table- land. This circumstance causes different 

 parts of the country to wear aspects that are very dissimilar, but nowhere 

 does the contrast appear so strongly as in Tierra del Fuego, where the sum- 

 mits of the Cordilleras, covered with perpetual snow, and very often also 

 by clouds, rains, and fog, can all be seen from the dry Atlantic coast. 

 Not quite so rapid, but still very wonderful, is the transition in Pata- 

 gonia ; and the region lying between 50° and 52° south latitude is in 

 addition more interesting than any part of Tierra del Fuego, owing to the 

 peculiar character given to parts of it by the presence of masses of 

 basaltic rocks and lava cones in the east, and of great ice fields in the 

 western valleys. 



* Science and the Faith, p. 197. 



