210 Zoology as Related to Evolution. 



ress " words that evince how distinctly a man may see 

 facts and yet how utterly blind he may be to truths, how 

 accurately know the trees of the forest and yet how igno- 

 rant be of the forest itself. 



On the other side have stood from the start such names 

 as those of Wallace, Spencer, Tyndall, Huxley, Haeckel, 

 themselves masters in the realms of thought. Little by 

 little Cuvier's great victory on the floor of the French 

 Academy, gloried in for thirty years as the triumph of fact 

 over theory, observation over speculation, has been turned 

 to defeat. The facts themselves, whole regiments of them, 

 enlisted so carefully under the banners of observation, some 

 the very ones that Agassiz himself gathered, have mutinied 

 against their own leaders and have put in their sturdiest 

 blows in behalf of theory. Darwin's doctrine, whether or 

 not it is regarded as the whole truth about descent, is held, 

 almost without exception, to be a large piece of it, the 

 grandest generalization yet reached in zoological progress. 

 And Darwin himself stands forth to-day a testimony for- 

 ever to the value of the speculative reason, as well as of the 

 plodding, practical, fact-gathering senses, as an agency in 

 winning victories even on the fields of material science. 



But while recognizing thus the inward growing force of 

 zoology's great names and the struggle for existence it went 

 through, there is another element of evolution working with 

 them in producing its changes, which is not to be forgotten 

 that of its environment and of the world's general unfold- 

 ing knowledge. Meat-eating, and with it the need of cutting 

 creatures up, making in every butcher's shop a dissecting- 

 room; medicine, and with it the study of man's struct- 

 ure ; vaticination, and with it the inspection of animal bod- 

 ies, each of these, must have contributed largely at the start 

 to its knowledge of facts. The discovery and exploration 

 of America in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth 

 centuries, bringing to its hands a multitude of new animals, 

 brought about almost as a necessity the classificatory stage 

 into which it then developed. And geology, revealing a 

 score of other new worlds with their missing links under 

 the old one's feet ; the microscope, revealing still another 

 score in the old one's every drop of water ; astronomy, ex- 

 plaining with its nebular hypothesis the origin of a myriad 

 worlds from one primal mist ; chemistry, explaining with its 

 atomic theory the origin of a myriad substances from pos- 

 sibly one primal element ; Lyell, explaining with his uniform- 



