VI. 



SOME OF THE BEARINGS OF THE 



EVOLUTION -TEACHING UPON 



PLANT - CULTIVATION / 



This century will be known in history as an epoch 

 in which the race came to a turning-point in its habit of 

 contemplating the origin and destiny of itself and of the 

 material universe. Various dominant philosophies had 

 taught, with more or less steadfastness, that man is in 

 kind wholly and eternally distinct from organic nature, 

 that nature, therefore, possesses only an incidental or 

 extrinsic interest to the race, and that the origin of or- 

 ganic forms is beyond the domain, or at least outside the 

 concern, of the human intellect. With little knowledge 

 of the external world and little incentive to inquire into 

 it, men were content to ascribe the origin of a given 

 object to a summary creation which was without distinct 

 occasion or purpose. The result of this habit of 

 thought was to depreciate the importance of remote 

 events and to detach the present generation, so far as its 

 organic constitution is concerned, from preceding gene- 

 rations, and even, also, from the effects of its environ- 

 ments. Phenomena were not studied with reference to 

 their antecedents. Man, standing apart from nature, 

 devoted his speculative philosophy to himself, and 



I Address before the State Board of Agripulture, Trenton, N. J., Jan. 16, 1895 

 Printed in Twenty-second Annual Report of the Stttte Board of Agriculture 

 177-188. 



(162) 



