Oaypole.] 1«^4 [April 1, 



life are results of unswerving "natural law," the details and modes of 

 •whose working he cannot yet trace. Chance at present seems supreme 

 among the tranformations which evolution has revealed. But chance is 

 only a name under which we disguise our ignorance. In a world under 

 the action of universal natural law. Chance, that is, causeless effect, can- 

 not exist. Chance in this sense is to the careful student of Nature un- 

 thinkable, inconceivable. Every event is a consequent of antecedents and 

 an antecedent of consequents. Order, such as it is, prevails everywhere. 

 The sequence is unbroken. Every existing species is a single link of a 

 chain, one end of which is lost in the distant past and the other end has 

 not yet emerged from the distant future. Every link depends from that 

 preceding it and serves as a point of attachment for that which follows. 

 What the one is the other will be, barring the effect of outside inlluences, 

 and could the exact nature of the organism be known and the exact effect 

 of environment be determined, it would be possible to foretell the exact 

 nature of the ensuing variate. 



But firm as is the faith of the biologist in the existence and ceaseless 

 action of universal law he admits his utter ignorance of that deeper force or 

 of those deeper forces that keep the law in action. This must be determined 

 from the working of the law itself. He must reason back from the law ta 

 the underlying principle and determine the nature of the latter from the 

 mode of the former. And if in this profound investigation he finds him- 

 self coming to results which clash with prevalent or preconceived opinion, 

 if the law ofthe universe seems other and harder than poets have feigned, yet 

 sentiment and prejudice should not be allowed to lie as stumbling-blocks 

 in the path of advancing knowledge, nor should the faint voices and dim 

 lights which come to us out of the darkness ahead be disregarded, though 

 they would lead us in different direction from that in which we were wont 

 and wishing to go. 



COXCLUSIOX. 



A possibility looms up before the biologist on this view of his science 

 which no other theory can encourage. If all organic changes come about 

 as consequences of changes of environment, why should it be beyond rea- 

 sonable hope that he may some day be able to grasp the effects of the lat- 

 ter so completely as to foretell the former? Astronomy was once in the 

 state of confusion and ignorance in which biology now lies. The move- 

 ments of the planets were an unsolved enigma, their paths a tangled maze, 

 their mutual influences a seemingly hopeless chaos. But Copernicus, 

 Kepler, Galileo, Xewton, Laplace and Leibnitz arose. The kev of the 

 enigma was found, the clue to the maze, the order in the chaos. And now 

 of all the physical sciences, astronomy is the most exact, the most thor- 

 oughly under control of mathematical laws. The astronomer, rising 

 above the task of merely recording the past, predicts the future. The 

 movements of the planets are understood ; universal gravitation enables 

 him to grasp them, and the subtle mathematical analysis gives him the 



