6 THE KINGDOM OF MAN 



development. In the latter half of the last century 

 this culminated in so complete a knowledge of the 

 movements of the heavenly bodies, their chemical 

 nature and physical condition so detailed a determina- 

 tion of the history of the crust of this earth and of the 

 living things upon it, of the chemical and physical 

 processes which go on in Man and other living things, 

 and of the structure of Man as compared with the 

 animals most like him, and of the enormous length of 

 time during which Man has existed on the earth that 

 it became possible to establish a general doctrine of 

 the evolution of the kosmos, with more special detail 

 in regard to the history of this earth and the develop- 

 ment of Man from a lower animal ancestry. Animals 

 were, in their turn, shown to have developed from 

 simplest living matter, and this from less highly 

 elaborated compounds of chemical ' elements ' differen- 

 tiated at a still earlier stage of evolution. There is, 

 it may be said without exaggeration, no school or body 

 of thinkers at the present day who are acquainted 

 with the facts now ascertained, which denies the 

 orderly evolution of the kosmos by the regular opera- 

 tion of a more or less completely ascertained series of 

 properties resident in the material of which it consists. 1 

 The process of evolution the interaction of these 

 ascertainable, if not fully ascertained properties has 

 led (it is held), in the case of the cooling cinder which 

 we call the earth by an inevitable and predestined 

 course to the formation of that which we call living 

 matter and eventually of Man himself. From this 

 process all disorderly or arbitrary interferences must, 

 it seems, be excluded. The old fancies as to presid- 

 ing demons or fairies which it was imagined had for 

 1 See, however, the letter from the Times, reprinted on p. 62. 



