CHAPTER TEN. 
The Verdict of History. 
John Fiske, who, in the seventies of the last century, 
popularized Darwinism in the United States, asserts that 
the scope of evolution is much wider than the organic 
field. “There is no subject great or small’ he wrote 
in “A Century of Science,” “that has not come to be 
affected by this doctrine.”” A development has been rec- 
ognized in plants, mountains, oysters, subjunctive moods, 
and the confederacies of savage tribes (p. 35). Fiske is 
one of those defenders of the evolutionistic philosophy 
who irritate by reason of their cocksureness. Hear him, 
in “Darwinism and Other Essays:’ “One could count 
on one’s fingers the number of eminent naturalists who 
still decline to adopt it’—the Darwinian hypothesis. 
That was in 1876. To-day we know that one can count 
on one finger the eminent naturalists of the present cen- 
tury who still accept it—Haeckel. It is possible that 
Fiske’s extension of the development theory, along lines 
laid down by Herbert Spencer, to all human history, even 
to “tribal confederacies,” is likewise subject to a revision. 
Indeed, it would seem that even without special or de- 
tailed knowledge, the failure of human history to con- 
form with this universal law would be apparent. Con- 
sider once more the basic concepts of Evolution. They 
are two in number. 1. Everything that is, has been 
evolved, having been involved (potentially, as a possibili- 
ty) in that which preceded it. Potentially, the feather 
of the blue-bird was in the speck of original protoplasm, 
potentially the flights of Dante’s and Goethe's genius were 
