No. 381.] A HALF-CENTURY OF EVOLUTION. 673 
development was practically completed at the beginning of the 
Quaternary period, and whose intellectual and moral improve- 
ment have, as it were, but just begun —the scientist, as such, 
can scarcely deny that this process of evolution, along so many 
lines and involving not only material but mental and moral 
advances, has gone on in an orderly and progressive way. The 
impression left on the mind is that all these changes, inorganic 
and organic, have been purposive rather than fortuitous, the 
result of the action of natural laws, impressed on matter by an 
intelligence and force outside of, but yet immanent in, all 
things material. 
With Hutton we may say: “ We have now got to o the end of 
our reasoning; we have no data further to conclude immedi- 
ately from that which actually is. But we have got enough, 
— we have the satisfaction to find that, in Nature, there is 
wisdom, system, and consistency.” 
Here, as men of science merely, we may pause and confess 
our ignorance of the first or ultimate cause of this progressive 
evolutionary movement pervading the material universe, and, 
Suspending our judgment, assume an agnostic position. But 
the human mind, even when rigidly scientific and logical, is so 
constituted that few of us are satisfied to stop here. He who 
is most capable of daring speculation in the realm of physical 
or biological or philosophical thought cannot refrain from 
inquiring into the nature of the first or moving cause, and how 
the present order of things has been brought about. 
As’a mere working hypothesis, we are, at least most of us, 
compelled to assume that the present order of things, material 
and immaterial, is not self-evolved, but is the result of an 
infinite Intelligence and Will, giving the initial impulse, and 
dominating as well as guiding and coordinating the progressive 
changes, whether cosmical, geological, or biological. The fact 
of the survival of the fittest, of the extinction of the unfit, the 
conclusion that throughout the universe order has arisen from 
chaos or the undifferentiated, the specialized from the general- 
ized, that the good and beautiful and true have in the past 
Overcome and will continue to outweigh what is unfit and evil 
in matter, mind, and morals, at least strongly suggests that the 
