high position in the world.  “I will not be called a mammal, or the son of a mammal!” once exclaimed an acquaintance of mine who perhaps had been brought up by hand.  Such expressions of feeling are crude, but the feeling is not unjustifiable.  It is urged that if man is physically akin to a baboon, as pigs are akin to horses, and cows to deer, then Humanity can in nowise be regarded as occupying a peculiar place in the universe; it becomes a mere incident in an endless series of changes, and how can we say that the same process of evolution that has produced mankind may not by and by produce something far more perfect?  There was a time when huge bird-like reptiles were the lords of creation, and after these had been “sealed within the iron hills” there came successive dynasties of mammals; and as the iguanodon gave place to the great Eocene marsupials, as the mastodon and the sabre-toothed lion have long since vanished from the scene, so may not Man by and by disappear to make way for some higher creature, and so on forever?  In such case, why should we regard Man as in any higher sense the object of Divine care than a pig?  Still stronger does the case appear when we remember that those countless adaptations of means to ends in nature, which since the time of Voltaire and Paley we have been accustomed to cite as evidences of creative design, have received at the hands of Mr. Darwin a very different interpretation.  The lobster’s powerful claw, the butterfly’s gorgeous tints, the rose’s delicious fragrance, the architectural instinct of the bee, the astonishing structure of the orchid, are no longer explained as the results of contrivance.  That simple but wasteful process of survival of the fittest, through which such marvellous things have come into being, has little about it that is analogous to the ingenuity of human art.  The infinite and eternal Power which is thus revealed in the physical life of the universe seems in nowise akin to the human soul.  The idea of beneficent purpose seems for the moment to be excluded from nature, and a blind process, known as Natural Selection, is the deity that slumbers not nor sleeps.  Reckless of good and evil, it brings forth at once the mother’s tender love for her infant and the horrible teeth of the ravening shark, and to its creative indifference the one is as good as the other.

In spite of these appalling arguments the man of science, urged by the single-hearted purpose to ascertain the truth, be the consequences what they may, goes quietly on and finds that the terrible theory must be adopted; the fact of man’s consanguinity with dumb beasts must be admitted.  In reaching this conclusion, the man of science reasons upon the physical facts within his reach, applying to them the same principles of common-sense whereby our everyday lives are successfully guided; and he is very apt to smile at the methods of those people who, taking hold of the question at the wrong end, begin by arguing about all manner of