5 8o* POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tical origin, without suggesting the method of their genesis or the nature 

 of their common parentage. If they were organic beings all our difficul- 

 ties would be solved by muttering the comfortable word * evolution ' one 

 of those indefinite words from time to time vouchsafed to humanity, which 

 have the gift of alleviating so many perplexities and masking so many 

 gaps in our knowledge. But the families of elementary atoms do not 

 breed ; and we can not therefore ascribe their ordered difference to acci- 

 dental variations perpetuated by heredity under the influence of natural 

 selection." 



This passage obliges us to infer that Lord Salisbury supposes 

 the theory of evolution to be concerned only with, things that 

 " breed." If the molecules of matter were " organic beings/' be 

 says, " the comfortable word ' evolution ' " might be thought to 

 suggest a solution ; but since tbey are not organic beings, evolu- 

 tion has no place. Apparently, then, Lord Salisbury thinks evo- 

 lution is concerned only with animals and plants. It is difficult 

 to believe that, well acquainted as be is with the science of the 

 day, he really means that which his words imply. We seem al- 

 most bound to assume an inadvertence of expression or a lapse of 

 thought. Still as his statement and his apparent belief have 

 been put before a million or two of readers, it seems needful to 

 do something toward dissipating the misapprehension caused, 

 by briefly indicating what is meant by evolution as rightly 

 understood. 



The Cosmos as a whole and in all its parts has reached its 

 present state either supernaturally or naturally ; and if naturally 

 then not living things only but all other things have come natu- 

 rally to be what they are. A doctrine which alleges evolution 

 for the animate world and assumes creation of the inanimate 

 world is absurd. Evolution, if alleged at all, must be alleged as 

 coextensive with all existence save that which is undergoing 

 the reverse process of dissolution. 



One who sees that our interpretations must leave us for ever 

 ignorant concerning the data of the process the space and the 

 time, the matter and the motion, as well as the ultimate energy 

 manifested through them may yet rationally seek a proximate 

 interpretation. If things of all kinds, inorganic, organic, and 

 superorganic, have become what they are, not supernaturally but 

 naturally, the implication is that their present state is the out- 

 come of preceding states ; and that the genesis of changes through- 

 out the past has been of like nature with the genesis of changes 

 at present. What, then, is the most dominant trait common to 

 successions of changes ? 



A thing ever being modified and re-modified diverges more 

 and more from its original condition : accumulated changes pro- 

 duce transformation. What is the general nature of that pro- 

 gressive transformation which constitutes evolution ? The first 



