AND ITS SELF-CONSERVATION. 279 



the same (logical) point. Whence it is evident that from 

 the very outset the ape type and the human type 

 were necessarily divergent, and that, therefore, neither 

 could by any possibility have descended from the other. 

 However complex the "pattern/' the threads in the 

 great loom of Creation never become tangled. Or, to 

 change the figure, Nature is the perfect " logical ma- 

 chine." But it is so only because it is nothing else 

 than the outer form, the infinitely extended self-mani- 

 festation of the Logos, or divine Reason. 



Many professed evolutionists, indeed, would stop short 

 of this latter statement, though they would concur 

 heartily in the affirmation of a fixed order as the very 

 core of any rational theory of evolution. It is the more 

 amazing, therefore, that Agassiz should have antagonized 

 the doctrine of organic evolution on the ground that it 

 implies the descent of vertebrate animals from the special- 

 ized types of invertebrate animals in other words, that 

 it assumes the arbitrary intermingling of types. And this 

 missing of the central thread of the doctrine of evolution 

 by such a man is no less unfortunate than amazing, since 

 his " Methods of Study in Natural History," embodying 

 as it does his (mis-) interpretation of the only doctrine of 

 organic evolution that Darwin or any other real scientist 

 ever advanced, has been, in America at least, the one 

 authoritative text-book seemingly justifying those who 

 hate Darwinism because they have never understood it, 

 and who refuse to make any effort to understand it 

 because they hate it. 



We come now to a further suggestion. It is: That 

 primarily the conditions of life on any sphere that comes 

 to be inhabited at all must be practically uniform over 



