PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON THE WAR-PATH. 793 



if it has been repeated, how often or under what special con- 

 ditions. 



The abstract dicta the vague verbal propositions on the 

 strength of which the possibility of this repetition has been de- 

 nied, are splendid specimens of those cobwebs of the brain which 

 used to entangle thought in the meshes of the scholastic philoso- 

 phy. The " law of parsimony " is the ambitious phrase under 

 which theorists have hid the stupid notion that what Nature does 

 once she never repeats again, or that results which she has ob- 

 tained by one method at some one time must never be compassed 

 by the same method again. Hear how magniloquently the great 

 agnostic professor sets forth this marvelous dogma : " If all living 

 beings have been evolved from pre-existing forms of life, it is 

 enough that a single particle of living protoplasm should have 

 once appeared upon the globe as the result of no matter what 

 agency. In the eyes of a consistent evolutionist any further inde- 

 pendent formation of protoplasm would be sheer waste." * This 

 is very grand. The limitation of the possibilities of creation by 

 the vision of a " consistent evolutionist " is delicious. It reminds 

 one of the American joke that the planets revolve round the sun, 

 " always subject to the Constitootion of the United States." But, 

 unfortunately for the dogma, it renounces the testimony of facts, 

 while sounder reasonings upon them are dead against it. Nature 

 is economical, but she is not miserly. The prodigality of Nature 

 is more conspicuous than her parsimony. The habitual expendi- 

 ture and repetition of all her processes is at least more clear to us 

 than her refusals to repeat them. Her fondness for identity of 

 principle in all her various operations is more pervading than her 

 casting aside of any method merely because it has been used al- 

 ready. That bits of living protoplasm, with inconceivably com- 

 plex potentialities within them, should have been called into being 

 once, and that nothing similar should ever have been done again, 

 may possibly be true ; but it is not according to analogy and we 

 can not accept it on the authority of Prof. Huxley. Still less can 

 so weighty a conclusion be hung securely on a gossamer structure 

 of abstract and empty words. Nineteenth Century. 



Photographs of the annular nebula in Lyra, taken at Algiers, and magnified 

 sixty-four times, give the largest images that have ever been -obtained of that ob- 

 ject, and make it possible to study the distribution of its light with a precision 

 that has not been heretofore approached. Two very clear maxima of light are 

 observable on opposite sides of the ring of unequal brilliancy. The space within 

 the ring, which is dark to ordinary vision, is found not to be wholly destitute of 

 photographic power. Chemical emanations radiate from it, the existence of which 

 was not suspected before. 



* Encyclopedia Britannica, ninth edition, Biology, p. 689. 



