82 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



only in a new form, often strikes us as sometliing unlieard of, and 

 even as paradoxical and almost impossible. A little over thirty- 

 years ago a little pliilosophical toy, the gyroscope, was intro- 

 duced and became very common. At first sight it seems to vio- 

 late all mechanical laws and set at naught the law of gravita- 

 tion itself. A heavy brass wheel, four to five inches in diameter, 

 at the end of a horizontal axle, six or eight inches long, is set 

 rotating rapidly, and then the free end of the axis is supported 

 by a string or otherwise. The wheel remains suspended in the 

 air while slowly gyrating. What mysterious force sustains the 

 wheel when its only point of support is at the end of the axle, 

 six or eight inches away ? Scientific and popular literature were 

 flooded with explanations of this seeming paradox. And yet it 

 was nothing new. The boy's top, that spins and leans and will 

 not fall, although solicited by gravity, so long as it spins, which 

 we have seen all our lives without special wonder, is precisely 

 the same thing. 



Now, evolution is no new thing, but an old familiar truth ; 

 but, coming now in a new and questionable shape, lo, how it 

 startles us out of our propriety ! Origin of forms by evolution 

 is going on everywhere about us, both in the inorganic and the 

 organic world. In its more familiar forms it had never occurred 

 to most of us that it was a scientific refutation of the existence 

 of God, that it was a demonstration of materialism. But now it 

 is pushed one step farther in the direction it has always been 

 going — it is made to include also the origin of species — only a 

 little change in its form, and lo, how we start ! To the deep 

 thinker, now and always, there is and has been the alternative — 

 materialism or theism. God operates Nature or Nature operates 

 itself ; but evolution puts no new phase on this old question. 

 For example, the origin of the individual by evolution. Every- 

 body knows that every one of us individually became what we 

 now are by a slow process of evolution from a microscopic spher- 

 ule of protoplasm, and yet this did not interfere with the idea 

 of God as our individual maker. Why, then, should the discov- 

 ery that the species (or first individuals of each kind) originated 

 by evolution destroy our belief in God as the creator of species ? 



3. It is curious and very interesting to observe the manner in 

 which vexed questions are always finally settled, if settled at all. 

 All vexed questions — i. e., questions which have tasked the pow- 

 ers of the greatest minds age after age — are such only because 

 there is a real truth on both sides. Pure, unmixed error does 

 not live to plague us long. Error, when it continues to live, 

 does so by virtue of a germ of truth contained. Great questions, 

 therefore, continue to be argued p^o and co7i from age to age, 

 because each side is in a sense — i. e., from its own point of view 



