SIR J. ARTHUR THOMSON 163 



do work, including in work the capture of the free 

 nitrogen of the air, which serves as a basis for arti- 

 ficial "fertilisers," these being utilised in turn to in- 

 crease the yield of the wheat fields and thus the bread 

 of life ! 



Many of us have enjoyed on a holiday the experi- 

 ence of seeing a familiar countryside in a new light, — 

 say at earliest dawn, or in moonlight, or under a veil 

 of snow. We notice features that we never noticed 

 before, new beauties, subtleties, values. In the new 

 light there is often something approaching a trans- 

 figuration. And so it is with the world in the light 

 of a new scientific generalisation of the first magni- 

 tude, the best example being the change of outlook 

 implied in evolutionism. In a deep sense it is true 

 that Darwin's voyage on the Beagle, when the idea 

 of Organic Evolution began to possess his mind, was 

 a Columbus voyage, discovering a new world — a 

 world not only evolved, but evolving. Men began to 

 see everything as part of a world-wide process of Be- 

 coming. Everything, as Bagehot put it, became an 

 antiquity — the long result of time; yet in another 

 aspect the cosmic process stood revealed as an aeonic 

 succession of novelties, as a long-drawn-out sequence 

 of new creations. The evolutionist outlook is essen- 

 tially kinetic, the old order changing and giving place 

 to the new; and many of the novelties, such as domes- 

 ticated animals, cultivated plants, and man himself, 

 are obviously teeming with possibilities of newnesses 

 In store. Every one knows how the naturalist's new 

 view of the world of organisms was associated with 

 the geologist's picture of the gradual differentiation of 



