AFTER-THOUGHTS. 



'M'ATURE teaches in no uncertain way the prin- 

 ciple of natural evolution;* illustrations are 

 continually before our eyes, and the doctrine 

 has passed as a truism into our literature, and is 

 taught in our schools. tAtoms, molecules, suns r 

 stars, planets, plants, animals, and man have been 

 evolved by natural processes; and consequently the 

 thoughts, emotions, works, and religions of men. 



Many centuries before the time of our earliest 

 records the parent race of the Aryan races the 

 Hindus, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Kelts, Teutons, 

 and Sklaves had passed through the earliest phases, 

 of its religious beliefs. 



* The idea that all the varied structures in the world, the divergent 

 forms of rock and minerals and crystals, the innumerable trees and 

 herbs that cover the face of the earth like a mantle, and all the animal 

 host of creatures great and small that dwell on the land or dart through 

 the air or people the waters that all these had arisen by natural laws 

 from a primitive unformed material was known to the Greeks, was- 

 developed by the Romans, and even received the approval of the early 

 Christian Fathers, who wrote long before the idea had been invented 

 that the naive legends of the Old Testament were an authoritative and' 

 literal account of the origin of the world. Thomas Henry Huxley, by 

 P. C. Mitchell. 



t Aristotle, in Physics II., 8 wrote, " Why are not the things which 

 seem the result of design, merely spontaneous variations, which, being 

 useful, have been preserved, while others are continually eliminated 

 as unsuitable?" 



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