646 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



on the special cbcmical constituents of an ancient ocean. Starting 

 from that single early form, they have gone on developing ever since, 

 from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, assuming ever more va- 

 ried shapes, till at last they have reached their present enormous vari- 

 ety of tree and shrub, and herb and sea-weed, of beast and bird, and 

 fish and creeping insect. Evolution throughout has been one and con- 

 tinuous, from nebula to sun, from gas-cloud to planet, from early jelly- 

 speck to man or elephant. So at least evolutionists say — and of course 

 they ought to know most about it. 



But evolution, according to the evolutionists, does not even stop 

 there. Psychology as well as biology has also its evolutionary ex- 

 planation : mind is concerned as truly as matter. If the bodies of 

 animals are evolved, their minds must be evolved likewise. Herbert 

 Spencer and his followers have been mainly instrumental in elucidating 

 this aspect of the case. They have shown, or they have tried to show 

 (for I don't want to dogmatize on the subject), how mind is gradually 

 built up from the simplest raw elements of sense and feeling ; how 

 emotions and intellect slowly arise ; how the action of the environ- 

 ment on the organism begets a nervous system of ever greater and 

 greater complexity, culminating at last in the brain of a Newton, a 

 Shakespeare, or a Mendelssohn. Step by step, nerves have built them- 

 selves up out of the soft tissues as channels of communication between 

 part and part. Sense-organs of extreme simi^licity have first been 

 formed on the outside of the body, where it comes most into contact 

 with external nature. Use and wont have fashioned them through 

 long ages into organs of taste and smell and touch ; pigment-spots, 

 sensitive to light or shade, have grown by infinite gradations into the 

 human eye or into the myriad facets of bee and beetle ; tremulous 

 nerve-ends, responsive sympathetically to waves of sound, have tuned 

 themselves at last into a perfect gamut in the developed ear of men and 

 mammals. Meanwhile corresponding percipient centers have grown up 

 in the brain, so that the colored picture flashed by an external scene 

 upon the eye is telegraphed from the sensitive mirror of the retina, 

 through the many-stranded cable of the optic nerve, straight up to 

 the appropriate headquarters in the thinking brain. Stage by stage 

 the continuous process has gone on unceasingly, from the jelly-fish 

 with its tiny black specks of eyes, through infinite steps of progression, 

 induced by ever-widening intercourse with the outer world, to the final 

 outcome in the senses and the emotions, the intellect and the will, of 

 civilized man. Mind begins as a vague consciousness of touch or 

 pressure on the part of some primitive, shapeless, soft creature ; it 

 ends as an organized and co-ordinated reflection of the entire physical 

 and psychical universe on the part of a great cosraical philosopher. 



Last of all, like diners-out at dessert, the evolutionists take to poli- 

 tics. Having shown us entirely to their own satisfaction the growth 

 of suns, and systems, and worlds, and continents, and oceans, and 



