1890.] The Teeth as Evidence of Evolution. 229 
He further says, “ I claim that as all organic life has such a 
struggle for existence, and as nature has to be always on the 
alert to select, that it is as much as an organ or an organism can 
do to keep itself up to the standard of healthy action; that 
death to the weakest is rather the rule than “survival of the 
fittest.” 
Has not the Doctor here given away his whole case? What 
is the “ survival of the fittest,” if it is not by the death of the weakest. 
Evolution as a process of nature is not the hasty generalization 
of a single science; rather a greater part of all the sciences have 
become but widely different yet converging avenues of approach, 
along which the student travels naturally to the central hypothesis, 
which has now become the dominant factor in all scientific in- 
vestigations. It lies at the foundation of the new astronomy of 
the sidereal and solar systems; geological study of the strata 
furnishes indubitable evidence of the app upon the earth of 
forms of life of the simplest nature, succeeded by forms of con- 
stantly-increasing complexity ; comparative anatomy teaches how 
from the three elementary layers of the blastodermal cells every 
tissue and organ of every animal is developed along identical 
lines; comparative botany tells the story; embryology, under 
the microscope, is daily showing that every highly-organized 
being is passing through that identical evolution of structure 
from the simple to the complex which the special creationists 
deny to nature at large; rudimentary organs are so many inter- 
rogation marks, unanswerable on any other ground than that of 
evolution; sociology is carrying the question into the study of 
government of the human kind collectively ; and the first chap- 
ter of Genesis, when read in the light of the evolution hypothesis, 
reveals a sublimity of conception and accuracy of description 
never before realized. Testimonies so different, yet confirming 
each other, appeal with a force like the result of an algebraic 
problem, which, when tested and confirmed by several different 
methods, possess an accumulative proof of geometrical rather 
than numerical ratio. But in our present view of the question 
the accumulative evidence is lost, for we are confined to a single 
line of inquiry. 

