I90 SCIENCE SKETCHES. 



said Linnaeus, '* is the wisdom of my life." And 

 between such wisdom and scientific knowledge there 

 can never be any real conflict. 



But if man's ancestry is joined to that of other 

 animals by a chain in which our knowledge can 

 find no break, how about the origin of his soul? 

 When did man begin to have a soul, if, as most of 

 us think, the lower animals have none? What is 

 the line between animal and man? 



Perhaps we cannot answer this. Perhaps we can 

 never know. Problems as difficult as this come 

 nearer to our lives. Each of us and of all men has 

 grown from the form of a helpless child, the child 

 by degrees from an embryo smaller at first than 

 the head of a pin. All the changes it undergoes 

 are gradual. '' Nature," says Linnaeus, " makes no 

 leaps." At what age does this embryo become 

 the man? At what age does man become " a liv- 

 ing soul "? We cannot tell; we do not know, un- 

 less, with the author of Genesis, we conceive the 

 essential character of manhood to be the acquisi- 

 tion of the knowledge of good and evil. As it is 

 with the individual, so with the species. Embryol- 

 ogists tell us that the physical life of the individual 

 is an epitome of the history of the whole group to 

 which it belongs. The embryonic life of man cor- 

 responds, so far as we can trace it, to the history of 

 that branch of the group of vertebrates which has 

 culminated in man. Unter jedevi Grab liegt eine 

 WeltgeschicJite, says a German proverb, — " Under 

 every grave lies a world-history." This sentence is 

 true in a physical as well as in a spiritual sense, 

 and it contains a philosophy deeper than its author 



