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our race (and who can doubt that in some measure it must be so?) we are bound by motives of interest and duty to secure for all classes of the people that kind of education which will lead to the development of the highest and most varied mental power. And no one who has been observant of the recent progress of the useful arts, and its influence upon the moral, social, and political condition of our population, can doubt that that education must include instruction in the phenomena of external nature, including more especially the laws and conditions of life and health; and that it ought to be, at the same time, such as will adapt the mind to the ready acquisition and just comprehension of varied knowledge.

In dealing with criminals we shall regard them as unfortunate without ceasing to hold them responsible, and so shall learn to temper severity with pity and some effort to effect reformation. It is a curious fact of Evolution, that the offspring will sometimes revert to the likeness of the grand-parent, or even some very remote ancestor, instead of bearing the image of the parent; for instance, there is reason to believe that sheep, in their early domesticated condition, were brown or dingy black; and a black sheep will occasionally appear in a flock where nothing of the kind has been known for generations. In like manner with mankind; some of the worst dispositions, which occasionally, without any assignable cause, make their appearance in families, may perhaps be reversions to a savage state, from which we are not removed by very many generations. This view seems indeed recognised in the common expression, that such men are the black sheep of the family.

"Furthermore, there is common companionship of

men with animals, and duties from him to them, which duties have the significant name of humanity, as though the humane man recognised his species wherever life is seen."1 Bishop Butler argues that brutes may possibly become rational and moral agents, and arrive at immortality, "since we know not what latent powers and capacities they may be endued with." 2 Mr Darwin has surprised many by the almost human degree of taste and caprice which he attributes to birds; on which subject also Mr Wallace says, "It is evident that if colours which please us also attract them, and if the various disguises of 'protective resemblance' are equally deceptive to them as to ourselves, then both their powers of vision and their faculties of perception and emotion must be essentially of the same nature as our own a fact of high philosophical importance in the study of our own nature, and our true relations to the lower animals." In all this, and in the grand fact that the animals stand related with us through some common ancestor, we have as strong a reason for showing kindness to brutes as could exist for any believer in metempsychosis who regarded the brute by his side as possibly his grandfather sent back to earth in a degraded form.

§ 5. Origin of Moral Species.

"A number of prisoners, taken during the Santal insurrection, were allowed to go free on parole, to work at a certain spot for wages. After some time cholera attacked them, and they were obliged to leave; but every man of them returned and gave up his earnings to the guard. Two hundred savages, with money in 1 J. J. Garth Wilkinson: The Human Body and its connection with Man, p. 284. 2 Butler's Analogy, part i. chap. i.

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their girdles, walked thirty miles back to prison rather than break their word!" Mr Wallace finds it difficult to account for such virtue by the operation of Natural Selection. This is only part of a more general question. Since Natural Selection acts on a strictly utilitarian method, how comes it that great intellectual truths, high moral conceptions, and pure conscientiousness of life are arrived at by men in any age or country, and are preserved? It is not, in the first instance, useful to a man to be gifted in these ways; he lives before his age, his virtue is not appreciated, he is neglected, or perhaps "selected" to die. The world has ever persecuted its reformers, and put its prophets to death. Whatever the laws of inheritance might have done for the new virtues, they are robbed of their opportunity : there will be no family to the first possessor, or if there is they will be bound up in the same bundle and burned. Nor is it easy to see how the occurrence of an intellectual or moral prodigy now and then would materially benefit the tribe, since the individual is destroyed as soon as discovered, or as soon as he begins to reprove his generation by his conduct, his words, or his writings.

Is not the explanation this: Virtue does not wait for physical generation and the slow growth of instinct; it is propagated more quickly in another way: the labour of the spirit produces progeny in other minds. To put good men to death is like sowing dragons' teeth-the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church—the new opinions or the new practices spread, and multiply a thousandfold. These are well-known phenomena, of which the common explanation is, that the producers and the produced stand in the relation of parent and offspring spiritual fathers and spiritual seed; but

what would be their rendering in terms of evolution? The man in whom the higher truth or higher virtue is first found may be said to constitute a new moral "species" or "variety." The men who are nearest to him in the points in which he is distinguished are the species from which he probably has sprung, and being nearest to him would require least alteration in themselves to make them quite like him. The influence fitted to produce this alteration is the presentation of his peculiarities before them in the example of his life or sufferings, in his verbal teaching, or his written works. These, therefore, are the "conditions of the environment" which induce "variation" in a number of individuals, and convert them into the new species: it is not that offspring are generated in the parental likeness, but one species is evolved from another. Thus we have the wonderful fact that a new moral species can create the conditions which will cause others to vary into its likeness-the highest moral life agrees with the lowest physical life in possessing a protoplasmic power of multiplying itself indefinitely by contact. Not only has Natural Selection transferred its action to the mind, but the environing conditions which occasion the mental variations before they are selected have also to a large extent become mental. But this does not at all explain how the variation in the first individual originates. Whence does he get that deeper truth, that purer conception, that more virtuous impulse which lifts him above all his fellows? This surely is as great a marvel as the evolution of living matter from matter not living, as inexplicable as any variation in the apparent absence of the conditions proper to effect the variation. Evolutionist philosophers would probably

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trace even this to physical causes and show that it must have lain potential in the original cosmic vapour, and if pressed to go further would allow the existence. of an Unknown Cause beyond; but probably the mass of men, for some time to come, will pass by the intermediate links, go straight to the great Fount of things, and say the new light comes by inspiration. How is it, again, when the new truth or virtue does come that it should have this marvellous power of spreading? When it brings death, or at least persecution, to him who first shows it, why should it prove fascinating to those who behold it, and to whom it may herald no better fate? It is difficult to conceive of any more satisfactory explanation than this-that truth and goodness have an immutable beauty proper to themselves, and sufficient to make them attractive when placed clearly before minds and consciences capable of perceiving the true relations of things.

It follows also-since there is no limit to this protoplasmic multiplying power possessed by moral species, since the contact may be extended by written record into other countries, and may reach down to after generations; since each new individual that catches up the new life for himself becomes a new centre from which it may spread; and since the higher moral species, like the higher physical species, tend to supplant the lowerit follows that if any age or country has ever seen, or should ever see, a perfect moral being, we may confidently read in that being the hope of the human race. Such a being many of us see in Jesus Christ; and accordingly our hope is in him, for ourselves and for humanity.