4 INTRODUCTION. 



rative. It may be wrongly told; it may be colored^ 

 exaggerated, over or understated like the record of 

 any other set of facts ; it may be told with a theo- 

 logical bias or with an anti -theological bias ; theories 

 of the process may be added by this thinker or by 

 that ; but these are not of the substance of the story. 

 Whether history is told by a Gibbon or a Green the 

 facts remain, and whether Evolution be told by a 

 Haeckel or a Wallace we accept the narrative so far 

 as it is a rendering of Nature, and no more. It is 

 true, before this story can be fully told, centuries still 

 must pass. At present there is not a chapter of the 

 record that is wholly finished. The manuscript is 

 already worn with erasures, the writing is often 

 blurred, the very language is uncouth and strange. 

 Yet even now the outline of a continuous story is be- 

 ginning to appear a story whose chief credential lies 

 in the fact that no imagination of man could have de- 

 signed a spectacle so wonderful, or worked out a plot 

 at once so intricate and so transcendently simple. 



This story will be outlined here partly for the story 

 and partly for a purpose. A historian dare not have 

 a prejudice, but he cannot escape a purpose the pur- 

 pose, conscious or unconscious, of unfolding the pur- 

 pose which lies behind the facts which he narrates. 

 The interest of a drama the authorship of the play 

 apart is in the players, their character, their motives, 

 and the tendency of their action. It is impossible to 

 treat these players as automata. Even if automata, 

 those in the audience are not. Hence, where inter- 

 pretation seems lawful, or comment warranted by th 

 facts, neither will be withheld. 



To give an account of Evolution, it need scarcely be 



