Specific and Organic Evolution. 91 



science as " the elimination of the supernatural (that 

 is, God) from all explanation of natural things," — 

 leaving to the First Cause liberty to walk about the 

 poles of heaven, but keeping the earth to ourselves. 

 There have been predecessors to Darwin both in 

 the line of natural science, and in that of politi- 

 cal economy. The English political school of 

 Hobbes, Adam Smith, and Malthus treated man- 

 kind as originally savage, then struggling with 

 one another for existence, then striving upwards by 

 the survival of the fittest and various compacts to 

 the present state of civilization. The evolution of 

 civilized man, which they assumed for the purpose 

 of political economy, is now a favorite common- 

 place in natural science, and was the subject of 

 Major Powell's address last spring when retiring 

 from the presidency of the Anthropological Society. 

 But it is the evolution of brute animals into man 

 which forms the final purpose and object of Dar- 

 winism, by showing that one species can change 

 into another. This we call Specific Evolution. 

 It is our subject at present; and it derives its 

 interest from the possibility, that, if one species 

 ever evolved out of another, the ape may have 

 changed and evolved into man. It is the same con- 

 sideration which extends a similar interest to the 

 question whether living things, or living cells, ever 

 evolved from non-living elements; a development 

 of life from non-life by spontaneous generation, 



