WHY PROGRESS IS BY LEAPS. 229 



things and know them more fully and exactly than ever before. 

 The brain, informed and stimulated by its new harvest of impres- 

 sions, imagined fresh feats of skill and directed them. The rude 

 stone, lifted from the ground and used as a hammer, was gradually 

 shaped as an axe, a scraper, a chisel, an arrowhead. There lay 

 the germ of the ingenuity which blossoms to-day in the locomo- 

 tive and steamship, in the observatory camera which multiplies 

 the known universe a thousand times, which in the telephone 

 catches the echo of storms sweeping the solar disk. As with the 

 faculty of speech, so doubtless also when the hand began to handle 

 and to tell the brain what it could feel and do. A gain so preg- 

 nant as dexterity, even in its feeble inception, would come as an 

 irresistible wedge between the fighters and the workers who had 

 it and their fellows who missed it by however little. 



The permutative tendency which we are tracing has dug other 

 gulfs than those which part man and anthropoid. Let us glance 

 for a moment at creatures far beneath mankind in the scale of 

 being. Birds are clearly derived from reptiles, but how far apart 

 to-day are the bird and the reptile ! It was the power of flight, 

 with all that it involved in transforming every organ of the body, 

 in revolutionizing habit, that stood at the parting of the ways. 

 Even in its beginnings this power would promote escape from 

 enemies, the procuring food in places otherwise inaccessible. In 

 the process of natural selection here would be the faculty valu- 

 able beyond any other, and therefore first seized in its favoring 

 variations. Flight beyond any other capacity would thus be 

 developed and increased as one generation succeeded another, 

 until at last the flier could disregard its unwinged enemies, seek 

 food on steepest crag or farthest islet, and there lay its eggs and 

 nurse its brood with none to make it afraid. As far as the fossil 

 record has been pieced together, it amply warrants this view of the 

 early history of the avian race. 



Take passage now to a widely different realm and note the per- 

 mutative effect wrought when insects supplant the winds at the 

 business of fertilizing flowers. Nectar secreted near the pollen of 

 a plant attracts flies and moths brushed by this pollen ; they sail 

 away to other flowers and tie a marriage knot with an effective- 

 ness impossible to the aimless air. The consequence is that sim- 

 ply through such woolliness of vesture as enables them to catch 

 dust on their clothes, insects of narrowest intelligence are un- 

 knowingly the painters, sculptors, and perfumers of unnumbered 

 varieties of blossoms. And indefinitely prior to either flower or 

 reptile was the day when the earth, a fiery cloud, had come to the 

 critical point, in its gradual loss of heat, where atom stood almost 

 within the attractive range of atom, when the latent combinability 

 of matter we call chemical was ready to be born. Was not the 



