XV. 



PROFESSOR VIRCHOW AND EVOLUTION. 



THIS world of ours has, on the whole, been an incle- 

 ment region for the growth of natural truth; but 

 it may be that the plant is all the hardier for the 

 bendings and buffetings it has undergone. The tor- 

 turing of a shrub, within certain limits, strengthens it. 

 Through the struggles and passions of the brute, man 

 reaches his estate ; through savagery and barbarism his 

 civilisation ; and through illusion and persecution his 

 knowledge of nature, including that of his own frame. 

 The bias towards natural truth must have been stroug 

 to have withstood and overcome the opposing forces 

 Feeling appeared in the world before Knowledge ; and 

 thoughts, conceptions, and creeds, founded on emotion, 

 had, before the dawn of science, taken root in man. 

 Such thoughts, conceptions, and creeds must have 

 met a deep and general want ; otherwise their growth 

 could not have been so luxuriant, nor their abiding 

 power so strong. This general need this hunger for 

 the ideal and wonderful led eventually to the differen- 

 tiation of a caste, whose vocation it was to cultivate 

 the mystery of life and its surroundings, and to give 

 shape, name, and habitation to the emotions which 

 that mystery aroused. Even the savage lived, not by 

 bread alone, but in a mental world peopled with forms 

 answering to his capacities and needs. As time 

 advanced in other words, as the savage opened out 

 into civilised man these forms were purified and 



