EVOLUTION AND THE DESTINY OF MAN. 459 



In examining this work, small as it is, we seem to discover, as it 

 were, traces of collaboration. It lias the appearance of having been 

 written not by one Mr. Fiske, but by two Mr. Fiskes. The first is 

 Mr. Fiske, the simple student of science and recorder of scientific facts ; 

 the second is an author who apparently can not rest content with facts 

 as they are, but constantly strives to view them in the light of some 

 foreign hypothesis. The second Mr. Fiske would appear to have edited 

 the first rather than the first the second ; yet the work has been done 

 in such a way that the diverse elements can easily be distinguished 

 and separated. 



The scientific Mr. Fiske discourses thus : As the Copernican theory 

 destroyed the notion that the earth was infinitely larger than all the 

 heavenly bodies, and was the center of the universe, thus giving a vio- 

 lent shock to the theological beliefs of the period, so the Darwinian 

 theory to-day has destroyed the notion, prevalent up to the present 

 time, that man occupies a position wholly ajDart from the rest of the 

 animal creation. It enables us to state that " man is not only a verte- 

 brate, a mammal, and a primate, but [that] he belongs, as a genus, to 

 the catarrhine family of apes" ; further, that *'the various genera of 

 platyrrhine and catarrhine apes, including man, are doubtless descended 

 from a common stock of primates, back to which we may also trace the 

 converging pedigrees of monkeys and lemurs, until their ancestry be- 

 comes indistinguishable from that of rabbits and squirrels." There is no 

 more reason for supposing that this conclusion will ever be overthrown 

 than there is for supposing that the Copernican theory will be banished 

 and the Ptolemaic restored. The facts which once furnished support to 

 the " argument from design " have received at the hands of Mr. Darwin 

 a very different interpretation. It is " that simple but wasteful pro- 

 cess of survival of the fittest," which is now invoked to explain the 

 marvels of adaptation with which Nature abounds. " The scientific 

 Darwinian theory alleges development only as the result of certain rig- 

 orously defined agencies. The chief among these agencies is natural 

 selection." A point, however, arrived, in the development of the brute- 

 ancestor of man, when psychical changes began to be of more use to him 

 than physical changes ; in other words, when better-developed brains 

 began to have the advantage over better-developed muscles. From 

 that point onward the brains of our progenitors steadily increased 

 "through ages of ceaseless struggle," not only in size but in complex- 

 ity of structure. So far, therefore, as man was concerned, " the pro- 

 cess of zoological change had come to an end, and a process of psycho- 

 logical change was to take its place." A difference in kind was thus 

 established between man and the lower animals, the result of the ac- 

 cumulation of differences of degree. In the same way we see a differ- 

 ence in kind established between a nebula and a solid sphere through 

 the operation of a gradual process of cooling and contraction. Upon 

 this point there should be no mistake, for it is thus that all differences 



