there is less agreement than ever among naturalists as to what the basis is in Nature upon which our idea of species reposes, or how the word is practically to be defined.  Indeed, when we consider the endless disputes of naturalists and ethnologists over the human races, as to whether they belong to one species or to more, and if to more, whether to three, or five, or fifty, we can hardly help fancying that both may be right,—­or rather, that the uni-humanitarians would have been right several thousand years ago, and the multi-humanitarians will be a few thousand years later; while at present the safe thing to say is, that, probably, there is some truth on both sides.  “Natural selection,” Darwin remarks, “leads to divergence of character; for more living brings can be supported on the same area the more they diverge in structure, habits, and constitution,” (a principle which, by the way, is paralleled and illustrated by the diversification of human labor,) and also leads to much extinction of intermediate or unimproved forms.  Now, though this divergence may “steadily tend to increase,” yet this is evidently a slow process in Nature, and liable to much counteraction wherever man does not interpose, and so not likely to work much harm for the future.  And if natural selection, with artificial to help it, will produce better animals and better men than the present, and fit them better to “the conditions of existence,” why, let it work, say we, to the top of its bent.  There is still room enough for improvement.  Only let us hope that it always works for good:  if not, the divergent lines on Darwin’s diagram of transmutation made easy ominously show what small deviations from the straight path may come to in the end.

The prospect of the future, accordingly, is on the whole pleasant and encouraging.  It is only the backward glance, the gaze up the long vista of the past, that reveals anything alarming.  Here the lines converge as they recede into the geological ages, and point to conclusions which, upon the theory, are inevitable, but by no means welcome.  The very first step backwards makes the Negro and the Hottentot our blood-relations;—­not that reason or Scripture objects to that, though pride may.  The next suggests a closer association of our ancestors of the olden time with “our poor relations” of the quadrumanous family than we like to acknowledge.  Fortunately, however,—­even if we must account for him scientifically,—­man with his two feet stands upon a foundation of his own.  Intermediate links between the Bimana and the Quadrumana are lacking altogether; so that, put the genealogy of the brutes upon what footing you will, the four-handed races will not serve for our forerunners;—­at least, not until some monkey, live or fossil, is producible with great toes, instead of thumbs, upon his nether extremities; or until some lucky geologist turns up the bones of his ancestor and prototype in France or England, who was