EVOLUTION: WHAT IT IS NOT, AND WHAT IT IS. 647 



plants, and animals, and minds, tbey proceed to show us the exactly 

 analogous and parallel growth of communities, and nations, and lan- 

 guages, and religions, and customs, and arts, and institutions, and 

 literatures. Man, the evolving savage, as Tylor, Lubbock, and others 

 have proved for us, slowly putting off bis brute aspect derived from 

 his early ape-like ancestors, learned by infinitesimal degrees the use of 

 fire, the mode of manufacturing stone hatchets and fiint arrow-heads, 

 the earliest beginnings of the art of pottery. With drill or flint he 

 became the Prometheus to his own small heap of sticks and dry leaves 

 among the Tertiary forests. By his nightly camp-fire he beat out grad- 

 ually his excited gesture-language and his oral speech. He tamed the 

 dog, the horse, the cow, the camel. He taught himself to hew small 

 cleai'ings in the woodland, and to plant the banana, the yam, the 

 bread-fruit, and the cocoanut. He picked and improved the seeds of 

 his wild cereals till he made himself from grass-like grains his barley, 

 his oats, his wheat, his Indian corn. In time, he dug out ore from 

 mines, and learned the use first of gold, next of silver, then of copper, 

 tin, bronze, and iron. Side by side with these long secular changes, 

 he evolved the family, communal or patriarchal, polygamic or monog- 

 amous. He built the hut, the house, and the palace. He clothed or 

 adorned himself first in skins and leaves and feathers ; next in woven 

 wool and fiber ; last of all in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptu- 

 ously every day. He gathered into hordes, tribes, and nations ; he 

 chose himself a king, gave himself laws, and built up great empires in 

 Egypt, Assyria, China, and Peru. He raised him altars, Stonehenges 

 and Karnaks. His picture-writing grew into hieroglyphs and cunei- 

 forms, and finally emerged, by imperceptible steps, into alphabetic 

 symbols, the raw material of the art of printing. His dug-out canoe 

 culminates in the ironclad and the Great Eastern ; his boomerang 

 and sling-stone in the Woolwich infant ; his boiling pipkin and his 

 wheeled car in the locomotive-engine ; his picture-message in the tele- 

 phone and the Atlantic cable. Here, where the course of evolution has 

 really been most marvelous, its steps have been all more distinctly his- 

 torical ; so that nobody now doubts the true descent of Italian, French, 

 and Spanish from provincial Latin, or the successive growth of the 

 trireme, the Great Harry, the Victory, and the Minotaur from the 

 coracles or proas of prehistoric antiquity. 



The grand conception of the uniform origin and development of 

 all things, earthly or sidereal, thus summed up for us in the one word 

 evolution, belongs by right neither to Charles Darwin nor to any 

 other single thinker. It is the joint product of innumerable workers, 

 all working up, though some of them unconsciously, toward a grand 

 final unified philosophy of the cosmos. In astronomy, Kant, Laplace, 

 and the Herschels ; in geology, Hutton, Lyell, and the Geikies ; in 

 biology, Buffon, Lamarck, the Darwins, Huxley, and Spencer ; in psy- 

 chology, Spencer, Romanes, Sully, and Ribot ; in sociology, Spencer, 



