EVOLUTION 47 



organs of extreme simplicity have first been formed on the 

 outside of tlie body, where it comes most into contact with 

 external nature. Use and wont have fashioned them 

 through long ages into organs of taste and smell and touch ; 

 pigment spots, sensitive to light or shade, have grown by 

 infinite gradations into the human eye or into the myiiad 

 facets of bee and beetle ; tremulous nerve-ends, responsive 

 sympathetically to waves of sound, have tuned themselves 

 at last into a perfect gamut in the developed ear of men 

 and mammals. Meanwhile corresponding percipient centres 

 have grown up in the brain, so that the coloured picture 

 flashed by an external scene upon the eye is telegraphed 

 from the sensitive mirror of the retina, through the many- 

 stranded cable of the optic nerve, straight up to the appro- 

 priate headquarters in the thinking brain. Stage by stage 

 the continuous process has gone on unceasingly, from the 

 jelly-fish with its tiny black specks of eyes, through infinite 

 steps of progression, induced by ever- widening intercourse 

 with the outer world, to the final outcome in the senses 

 and the emotions, the intellect and the will, of civilised 

 man. Mind begins as a vague consciousness of touch or 

 pressure on the part of some primitive, shapeless, soft 

 creature : it ends as an organised and co-ordinated reflection 

 of the entire physical and psychical universe on the part 

 of a great cosmical philosopher. 



Last of all, like diners-out at dessert, the evolutionists 

 take to politics. Having showTi us entirely to their own 

 satisfaction the growth of suns, and systems, and worlds, 

 and continents, and oceans, and plants, and animals, and 

 minds, they proceed to show us the exactly analogous and 

 parallel growth of communities, and nations, and languages, 

 and religions, and customs, and arts, and institutions, and 

 literatures. Man, the evolving savage, as Tylor, Lubbock, 

 and others have proved for us, slowly putting off his brute 

 aspect derived from his early ape-like ancestors, learned by 



