6 PREFACE. 



knowledge in its place. It has cheered and 

 comforted me not a little to find such men as 

 Huxley and Darwin and Alfred Wallace turn- 

 ing disconsolately away from the same little 

 difficult nebulae that have worried my weaker 

 eyes. 



Possibly I am the only person in the world 

 who ever fancied that the highest form of 

 poetry may lurk in the problems of compara- 

 tive anatomy and physiology. Be this as it 

 may, behind the hints and correlations and 

 suggestions of dry bones and dessicated fossils 

 there appears to me an epic of awful glory 

 and power and significance. What a romance 

 is geology! What a melodrama is life from 

 :'ts lowest to its highest forms ! We are apt 

 to look upon Darwin as a realist ; but when 

 we read him well he is a poet like Milton, a 

 dreamer like Pythagoras, a prophet like 

 Daniel, a dramatist like Shakespeare. 



The more I have studied Nature, the more I 

 have become aware of God. When 1 approach 

 the beginning I find Him, and His hand puts 

 me gently but firmly away, as if to say: *' I 

 stand here all alone." When I approach the 

 end, there too is God standing all alone, self- 

 existent, sufficient, unimaginable, at once the 

 cause and the culmination, the germ, the 

 bloom, and the fruit of all things. I do not 

 expect that men ever will find the secret of 

 life locked in a cell or in any other minute 

 division of matter. No analysis of the spe- 

 cialist, no synthesis of the generalizer can ever 

 pass beyond the vail. God said: "Let life 

 be," and life was. Still I believe in evolution ; 

 I feel it, I see it ; but it is evolution by God's 

 law, bounded by His limiting purpose. When 

 we study Nature we study Him, not in the 

 materialistic or pantheistic sense, but in the 



