162 Sioux City Academy of Science and Letters. 



possible without it. We should be much more helpless, 

 if deprived of it, than Primitive man was, because lux- 

 uries or advantages which have never been known are 

 not missed. When our first ancestors, naked savages, 

 wandered over the earth, seeking and finding only a 

 bare subsistence, all the natural means of our later prog- 

 ress and culture were already present and waiting for 

 human intelligence to make use of them. Condensed 

 sunshine of Carboniferous days, in the form of coal, was 

 locked up and preserved in thick beds all over the world. 

 But to the savage it was only black and useless stones 

 and rocks. Hills and mountains of iron ore were piled 

 up everywhere, over which he wandered in search of the 

 game or roots he ate. Coal and iron ore, without the aid 

 of fire, are only a useless part of the rocky crust of our 

 earth. Fire must join these two hard and inert sub- 

 stances of civilization and progress. By this union has 

 since come the grand work of forges, foundries and shops 

 in all the world of the present time. By the help of this 

 union of coal and iron we have bridged the oceans with 

 our mighty moving steamships, and our trains of palace 

 and freight cars follow their shining way, across the con- 

 tinents. This has been a long slow development, and it 

 took thousands of generations to teach primitive man 

 the very beginnings of such knowledge. He struggled 

 along through centuries in his slow progress of evolu- 

 tion. We must believe that (evolution included man as 

 well as all other beings and was universal in its work, 

 or the theory becomes entirely worthless. As an arch, 

 no matter how skillfully and perfectly made, cannot 

 stand unless it be complete, so evolution, if it excepts 

 man, will fall from its own w^eight. He who professes to 

 accept the theory of evolution and development through 

 all nature, both inorganic and organic, up to man, and 

 then requires a supernatural interference of creating 

 power to account for himself, is either inconsistent or 

 ignorant of that which he professes to believe. If there 

 is anything in man, any faculty that is outside the range 

 of causation, then the theory of evolution is of no value, 

 and we are all mistaken in our belief. Prof. Huxley has 

 said: "Structure for structure, down to the minutest 

 microscopical details, the eye, the ear, the olfactory or- 



