Scope and Purport of Evolution 43 



change in this direction will go on. He could see, 

 too, that along with this change there has been a 

 building-up of tribes into nations, a division of 

 labour, a differentiation of governmental functions, 

 a series of changes in the relations of the individ- 

 ual to the community. To see so much as this is 

 to whet one's craving for enlarged resources where- 

 with to study human progress. Mr. Spencer had 

 a wide, accurate, and often profound acquaintance 

 with botany, zoology, and allied studies. The 

 question naturally occurred to him, Where do we 

 find the process of development most completely 

 exemplified from beginning to end, so that we can 

 follow and exhaustively describe its consecutive 

 phases? Obviously in the development of the 

 ovum. There, and only there, do we get the whole 

 process under our eyes from the first segmentation 

 of the yolk to the death of the matured individual. 

 In other groups of phenomena we can only see a 

 small part of what is going on ; they are too vast for 

 us, as in astronomy, or too complicated, as in so- 

 ciology. Elsewhere our evidences of development 

 are more or less piecemeal and scattered, but in em- 

 bryology we do get, at any rate, a connected story. 

 So Mr. Spencer took up Baer's problem, and 

 carried the solution of it much further than the 

 great Esthonian naturalist. He showed that in 



