406 THE LAW OF EVOLUTION CONCLUDED. 



ously increased in precision. Accuracy of evolutions is 

 given by perpetual drill; so that in battle, men and the regi- 

 ments formed of them, are made to take definite positions 

 and perform definite acts at definite times. Once more, 

 there has gone on that integration by which the multiform 

 actions of an army are directed to a single end. By a co-or- 

 dinating apparatus having the commander-in-chief for its 

 centre, the charges, and halts, and retreats are duly con- 

 certed; and a hundred thousand individual actions are 

 united under one will. 



The progress here so clearly marked, is a progress trace- 

 able throughout social functions at large. Comparing the 

 rule of a savage chief with that of a civilized government, 

 aided by its subordinate local governments and their officers, 

 down to the police in the streets, we see how, as men have 

 advanced from tribes of tens to nations of millions, the regu- 

 lative process has grown large in amount; how, guided 

 by written laws, it has passed from vagueness and irregu- 

 larity to comparative precision; and how it has sub-divided 

 into processes increasingly multiform. Or observing how 

 the barter that goes on among barbarians, differs from our 

 own commercial processes, by which a million's worth of 

 commodities is distributed daily; by which the relative val- 

 ues of articles immensely varied in kinds and qualities are 

 measured, and the supplies adjusted to the demands; and 

 by which industrial activities of all orders are so combined 

 that each depends on the rest and aids the rest; we see that 

 the kind of action which constitutes trade, has become pro- 

 gressively more vast, more varied, more definite, and more 

 integrated. 



145. A finished conception of Evolution we thus find 

 to be one which includes the re-distribution of the retained 

 motion, as well as that of the component matter. This 

 added element of the conception is scarcely, if at all, less 

 important than the other. The movements of the Solar 



