242 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the wliole system of things, as far as we know it, depends on the per- 

 petual rotation of the heavenly bodies ; and without original irregu- 

 larity in the distribution of matter no motion of rotation could ever 

 have spontaneously arisen. And, if this irregularity be thus original, 

 Science can give no account of it. Science, therefore, will have to be- 

 gin with assuming certain facts for which it can never hope to account. 

 But it may begin by assuming that, speaking roughly, the universe 

 was always very much what we see it now, and that composition and 

 decomposition have always nearly balanced each other, and that there 

 have been from the beginning the same sun and moon and planets and 

 stars in the sky, the same animals on the earth and in the seas, the 

 same vegetation, the same minerals ; and that though there have been 

 incessant changes, and possibly all these changes in one general direc- 

 tion, yet these changes have never amounted to what would furnish a 

 scientific explanation of the forms which matter has assumed. Or, on 

 the other hand, Science may assert the possibility of going back to a 

 far earlier condition of our material system ; may assert that all the 

 forms of matter have grown up under the action of laws and forces 

 still at work ; may take as the initial state of our universe one or many 

 enormous clouds of gaseous matter, and endeavor to trace with more 

 or less exactness how these gradually formed themselves into what we 

 see. Science has lately leaned to the latter alternative. To a be- 

 liever the alternative may be stated thus : We all distinguish between 

 the original creation of the material world and the history of it ever 

 since. And we have, nay all men have, been accustomed to assign to 

 the original creation a great deal that Science is now disposed to assign 

 to the history. But the distinction between the original creation and 

 the subsequent history would still remain, and forever remain, al- 

 though the portion assigned to the one may be less, and that assigned 

 to the other larger, than was formerly supposed. However far back 

 Science may be able to push its beginning, there still must lie behind 

 that beginning the original act of creation — creation not of matter 

 only, but of the various kinds of matter, and of the laws governing 

 all and each of those kinds, and of the distribution of this matter in 

 space. 



This application of the abstract doctrine of evolution gives it an 

 enormous and startling expansion — so enormous and so startling that 

 the doctrine itself seems absolutely new. To say that the present 

 grows by regular law out of the past is one thing ; to say that it has 

 grown out of a distant past in which as yet the present forms of life 

 upon the earth, the present vegetation, the seas and islands and con- 

 tinents, the very planet itself, the sun and moon, were not yet made — 

 and all this also by regular law — that is quite another thing. And the 

 bearings of this new application of science deserve study. 



Now, it seems quite plain that this doctrine of evolution is in no 

 sense whatever antagonistic to the teachings of religion, though it may 



