1889-] NEW-YORK MICROSCOPICAL SOCIETY. 3 



eternal. Like the human body, it may rearrange its component 

 units and renew its ever-perishing tissues, but there will remain 

 always an ultimate framework of formed material, to which 

 cling permanent characteristics and a changeless individuality. 



The theory of Evolution is no exception to the general rule, 

 as to the incompleteness and mutability of all human attempts 

 at a system of universal knowledge. In fact, it is itself a devel- 

 opment — what we know as Evolution to-day being the descend- 

 ant of a long line of constantly varying ancestors, reaching back 

 at least to the time of Plato and Aristotle, and perhaps we may 

 say even to the earliest appearance of anything like a philosophic 

 idea in the mind of the first thinking man. So obvious is the 

 fact of unfolding growth that, as soon as the human intellect 

 was directed to the actual study of organic forms, it must have 

 begun trying to account for those forms, by some sort of a 

 theory of derivation. Probably the first real reasoning that 

 man did was inductive, and it is likely that some rude kind of 

 cosmology preceded any distinct notion of cosmogony. Perhaps 

 the original basis of all thought on the subject was a rough 

 comparison, such as a primitive Arab might make, who, having 

 been accustomed to the dromedary with one hump, should 

 make the acquaintance of the Bactrian camel with two humps. 

 It seems as if even Adam must have had his attention arrested 

 by such slight differences as this in the animals around him, 

 particularly when, as it is said, they passed before him to be 

 named. For naming is the mother of classification, and classi- 

 fication means first comparison and then separation. 



From the examination and contemplation of things immedi- 

 ately about it, the human mind intuitively and inevitably reached 

 out for a theory that would explain also the more remote por- 

 tions of the cosmos, which it but dimly perceived and, at first, 

 but vaguely wondered at. Almost the earliest man began grop- 

 ing for a universal law, — a general formative principle. The 

 search at last resulted in something like a coherent conception 

 of the origin and development of things, which was formulated 

 by the early Greek philosophers and physicists, and which, with 

 many mere variations and occasional specific modifications, has 

 come down to us through Aristotle, Lucretius, Descartes, 

 Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin, Wallace, and 

 Spencer. 



