880 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE 



of you have been forced to listen to the outcries and de- 

 nunciations which rang discordant through the land for 

 some years after the publication of Mr. Darwin's "Origin 

 of Species. 1 ' Well, the world even the clerical world 

 has for the most part settled down in the belief that Mr. 

 Darwin's book simply reflects the truth of nature: that 

 we who are now " foremost in the files of time" have come 

 to the front through almost endless stages of promotion 

 from lower to higher forms of life. 



If to any one of us were given the privilege of looking 

 back through the eons across which life has crept toward 

 its present outcome, his vision, according to Darwin, would 

 ultimately reach a point when the progenitors of this as- 

 sembly could not be called human. From that humble 

 society, through the interaction of its members and the 

 storing up of their best qualities, a better one emerged; 

 from this again a better still; until at length, by the in- 

 tegration of infinitesimals through ages of amelioration, 

 we came to be what we are to-day. We of this genera- 

 tion had no conscious share in the production of this grand 

 and beneficent result. Any and every generation which 

 preceded us had just as little share. The favored organ- 

 isms whose garnered excellence constitutes our present 

 store owed their advantages,* first, to what we in our ig- 

 norance are obliged to call '* accidental variation"; and, 

 secondly, to a law of heredity in the passing of which our 

 suffrages were not collected. With characteristic felicity 

 and precision Mr. Matthew Arnold lifts this question into 

 the free air of poetry, but not out of the atmosphere of 

 truth, when he ascribes the process of amelioration to "a 

 power not ourselves which makes for righteousness." If, 

 then, our organisms, with all their tendencies and capaoi- 



