162 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
forward as significantly into the Future, as the other backward into the Past. If 
by minute inspection of the recent footprints of changes that are now passing 
over the world, one philosopher was guided to proclaim whence those changes 
started, surely another philosopher of equal powers could tell us, at least as 
clearly, whither they are going? For it must not be imagined that Darwin's 
self-appointed mission of tracing Nature backward to its source was in any especial 
way facilitated by the scanty relics of the actual past that geology has unearthed. 
As a matter of fact the strongest arguments against his theories of gradual evolu- 
tion, such as the sudden appearance of distinct species in particular strata, and 
many other similar difficulties, have been furnished by geologists. His Origin 
of Species is written entirely in the living characters of the present. Old types 
are indeed introduced here and there by way of comment and illustration, but if 
the Dinotherium and the Mastodon were still slumbering the sleep of the extinct 
Unknown, in company with the undiscovered ape-like animal, the "Missing 
Link " of popular imagination, the descent of man would have been no more 
difficult to trace. It was from lions and peacocks, toads and insects — various 
renderings in aberrant modern types of the same old story of evolution and develop- 
ment — that Darwin compiled the volumes that have revolutionized modern phi- 
losophy and modes of thought. It could not have been otherwise. The organic 
remains of geology would have been as useless to guide him through the free 
realms of thought he traversed, as the name of his own street corner to teach him 
the geography of Europe. The interval that has elapsed since woolly elephants 
browsed along the site of the Strand, mysteriously long as it appears to us, would 
occupy merely the last page of the latest volume of the interminable History of 
Man. It is indeed a fragment of the original, but so mutilated and imperfect a 
fragment as to be incomparably inferior to the innumerable translations and mod- 
ifications of the text printed on loose sheets and scattered over the globe wher- 
ever an animal or fish is found, wherever a bird or insect flies. By collecting 
and deciphering these isolated sentences, Darwin has reproduced, in due propor- 
tion, but vague outline, the whole of the mighty work; and where the original 
geological fragment tallied with his translation he said so, and where it did not 
tally, he said so. But he was in no way indebted for his knowledge of the past 
to a study of the past. From the present attitude of Nature he inferred whence 
it had come, and we can guess whither it is going. 
It will be remembered that Darwin's theory of the evolution of different 
species receives strong confirmation from the parallel changes which each indi- 
vidual of those species undergoes in growth from the embryo to maturity. The 
human embryo, for instance, has a hairy skin ; a brain with convolutions similar 
to those of an ape; a great toe projecting like a thumb from the side of the foot, 
a single pulsating vessel instead of a heart, and a tail longer than its legs. These 
characteristics disappear long before birth ; and thus each human individual before 
coming into the world exemplifies in his own person the development of his 
species from some lower animal -lower even than the ape — and furnishes solid 
collateral evidence of the truth of the theory founded by Darwin upon a compari- 
