218 Mr. Conway [Feb. 9, 



preparation for him, an effort (as physiologists say,) to produce him : 

 the meaner creatures, the primeval sauri, containing the elements of 

 his structure and pointing at it on every side, whilst the world was at 

 the same time prejDaring to be habitable by him. He was not made 

 sooner because his house was not ready." " Man is made, the 

 creature who seems a refinement on the form of all who went before 

 him, and more perfect in the image of his Maker by the gift of moral 

 nature ; but his limbs are only a more exquisite organization, — say, 

 rather, the finish of the rudimental forms that have been already 

 sweeping the sea and creeping in the mud : the brother of his 

 hand is even now cleaving the Arctic sea in the fin of the whale, 

 and innumerable ages since was pawing the marsh in the flip2)er of 

 the saurus." It is in a sense studying the law of evolution itself to 

 study the impression it made upon the mind of Emerson, as a law of 

 which he was absolutely convinced in the beginning of his career. 

 His first book Nature (1836) is a Vedas of the scientific age, in which 

 instead of man's ancient worship of sun, cloud, star, these glorious 

 objects unite in celebration of Man. The devcloi)ment of man is the 

 spiritualization of nature. The course of man's culture turns nature 

 to a kingdom of Use, translates its laws into ethics, its aspects into 

 language, its facts and phenomena into science, builds its sublimities 

 into a temple. Man is what nature means. The only break in the 

 radiant optimism of the book is a complaint that Science had not ex- 

 plained the relationship of man to the forms around him, the unity 

 of things ; and almost at the very moment when that book appeared 

 (Sept., 1836) young Charles Darwin landed from the Beagle with tidings 

 of the new intellectual world for which the new world thinker was call- 

 ing. It was to be twenty-two years yet before Darwin was prepared to 

 announce his theory, but meanwhile Emerson had gained some farther 

 light in that direction. It came to him while exploring an unpro- 

 mising region, — the works of John Hunter. In an essay he S2)eaks 

 of an " electric word " of Hunter's on develojDment. I can find but 

 one reference to development in Hunter's works. Palmer's Hunter 

 appeared in 1835, while Emerson was writing his Nature, and its 

 reference to development is in Vol. I., a footnote to p. 265 : — " If we 

 w^ere capable of following the progress of increase of number of the 

 parts of the most perfect animal, as they formed in succession, from the 

 very first to its state of full perfection, we should probably be able to 

 compare it to some of the incomplete animals themselves of every 

 order of animals in the creation, being at no stage different from some 

 of those inferior orders ; or in other words, if we were to take a series 

 of animals, from the more imj)erfect to the jDcrfect, we should probably 

 find an imperfect animal corresponding with some stage of the most 

 perfect." 



The fact that each animal passes in the course of its development 

 through stages comparable to those of adult animals of lower organiza- 

 tion is now explained by evolution ; to Emerson it was itself a partial 

 explanation, bringing order into phenomena which traditional theories 



