EVOLUTION 957 



ing so strictly utilitarian in each of its self-sustaining beginnings, 

 becomes increasingly spontaneous, creative, and poetic in its life- 

 developing and life-continuing. All these are but culminant expres- 

 sions of what we find in more simply organic life ; and hence it is 

 that fabulists and mythologists, poets and heralds, have ever used 

 so many of its forms as prefiguring and illustrating our human life, 

 sometimes to intensifying or exaggerating its activities. These old 

 nature-students were thus more evolutionist than they knew. Only 

 in its life-sustaining beginnings, if even then, can life seem strictly 

 utilitarian; it is increasingly creative, literally poetic, since life- 

 shaping. For in its race-continuing developments, which so deeply 

 modify and advance its individuality, it becomes creatively evolu- 

 tionary; so in the old and fundamental as well as higher sense, it is 

 truly poetic; for all save degradedly utilitarian life-forms, such as 

 the parasites, thus attain to their full beauty, of which the very 

 incipience so often enhances that of their individual youth as well. 

 The whole vast and complex, yet orderly and increasingly intelli- 

 gible cosmogonic process thus culminates. For what is beauty? First 

 of all in the glories of inorganic nature; then these as affording 

 environment and scene for the yet subtler and more varied results, 

 expressions, and indices of the innumerable perfectings of Life, in 

 its protean Evolution. Each species and variety is thus the product 

 of some characteristic combination of evolution-factors, both the 

 inward and the outward; and its biography thus differs from its 

 neighbour's. There is a particular plot in the story of each, though the 

 great Nature Comedy includes them all. "In Nature's infinite book 

 of mystery, we can a little read;" but it will be long before we have 

 unravelled all these minor plots, and still longer before we can fully 

 appreciate and worthily take part in this long Tragi-Comedy of 

 Life, in which we short-lived mortals are each and all actors even 

 more than spectators; preparing for our successors in their turn. 



GROWTH, FORM, AND VARIATION.— Since Descartes's invalu- 

 able introduction — or rather development — of his co-ordinates, these 

 have been of increasing use, first in mathematics, but also in cartog- 

 raphy and in meteorology, etc., in physics, later in social statistics, 

 whence next in biometrics. But it seems seldom adequately realised, 

 even by those who most use such graphics for their special purposes, 

 that they really afford a general method, very comprehensively 

 applied throughout the range of the sciences, and of course to many 

 arts as well, as from architectural plans, elevations, and sections as 

 static, to the kinetic graphs of engineering processes. The mineralo- 

 gist's crystal- diagrams, the chemist's graphic formulae, or now his 

 imageries of atomic structure, are alike thus clarified before the 

 mind. The biologist thus helps his thinking and exposition also: 

 witness his diagrams of the natural orders of flowering plants, or 



