THE CHART OF EVOLUTION 17 



brilliant and stupid, savage and superman — ^but still the old evils 

 persisted. Next religion and education called in their little 

 sister, philanthropy. She, too, insisted on the necessity of a new 

 birth, but her method was different. She devoted herself to the 

 poor and wretched quite as much as did her elder sisters, but she 

 began with the body, worked next on the mind, and believed that 

 when body and mind were right, the spirit would also be regen- 

 erated. Yet the old misery persists, and is perhaps today as 

 great as ever. Good government is another little sister who has 

 vainly made the same attempt. She, too, has failed to prevent 

 the world's worst war, the world's worst massacres, and the 

 world's most awful collapse of civilization. 



Have religion, education, philanthropy, and government failed? 

 Shall we despair because the Church, the School, the Charity 

 Organization, and the State have not yet destroyed war, pesti- 

 lence, lust, greed, cruelty, and selfishness.? Far from it. These 

 agencies cannot possibly play their proper parts unless science 

 comes to their aid. Not mechanical science, although that has its 

 useful part to play, but biological science. The sum and sub- 

 stance of biology is evolution, the Darwinian idea that no type 

 of living creature is permanent. With his splendid sweep of 

 vision Darwin saw that neither man nor any other creature is a 

 finished product. Variations occur, and natural selection by 

 means of the environment ruthlessly exterminates some of them 

 and preserves others to form new species. The variations are 

 possibly sudden and marked rather than gradual and slight as 

 Darwin supposed, but that does not alter the main idea. Dar- 

 winism, as we here use the term, means biological evolution, and 

 evolution means constant change in species and in races. The 

 idea is still so new that we have not yet learned to apply it on any 

 wide scale. We are indeed applying it to plants and animals, and 

 hence are improving them immensely. We are also beginning to 

 apply it to the study of disease, and are thereby working wonders. 

 Yet thus far we have scarcely begun to apply the principles of 



