CHAPTER XXX. 

 EPII^OGUE^EVOLUTION OF THK FIVE-PETALED PINK. 



EVOLUTION is the grandest theme that ever engaged the 

 mind of man. It is the history of creation, stepping by 

 resistless law from a green I{den to a cindered world. It 

 does not derogate from Deity, but magnifies omnipotence. Every 

 man must have a loftier conception of the creative cause, who 

 sees life as an act of God, and evolution as its law. One theory 

 views God as an adventurer, without prevision, or prophecy, gov- 

 erning the world from contingencies as they arise. The other sees 

 him as an omnicient ruler, trailing through duration a wise and 

 inexorable law, that moulds worlds out of nebulae, cosmos out of 

 chaos, and life out of latency. Darwin climbed this idea and built 

 his throne on its simple truth. Under the law of evolution, orders, 

 classes, genera and species of the vegetable kingdom, deploy 

 themselves into serried ranks, by the imperious mandate of the 

 best to persist, the fittest to survive, the strongest to endure, and 

 no flower blooms without an object, no insect crawls on aim- 

 less feet, no man aspires without a purpose. 



It was an act of amazing power to create a plant instinct with 

 life, and one of measureless wisdom, to project a law by the thau- 

 maturgy of which a noxious Blind Starwort should change into 

 the humble five-petaled pink, seen by Theophrastus, that into the 

 carnation of Alegatiere, and that into Dianthus Superba of the 

 Twentieth Century. Man is a civihzed savage, a carnation is 

 an evolved weed. Heredity and progress are fighting forces, one 

 advances, the other retreats. One cries "go!" the other "whoa!" 

 One is history, the other prophecy; one lifts men to monarchs, 

 the other lapses them to lazzaroni; one lifts a catchfly to a Uaw- 

 son, the other would degrade it to a weed. 



Carnations have kept abreast with the progress of the ages, 

 in their marvelous march, and have ever advanced the standards 



