exist. Forms adjusted to their surroundings ought by the hypothesis to remain unchanged until the circumstances change. Only those of their variations could come to any thing which happened to be equally well adapted to the unchanged circumstances; and this may be what we have when two or more nearly related species inhabit similar stations in the

same area.

From this point of view you see how wide of the mark are those who imagine that Darwinian evolution supposes that the organic world was in early times, or at any time, out of joint or in ill relations to the surroundings. On the contrary, it is of the very nature of natural selection, that, while inducing changes eventually immense, it should preserve throughout all time a condition of harmonious adaptation. Catastrophes must destroy; but gradual modification, under the long and silent struggle which never hastes and never rests, preserves while it renovates and diversifies the races.

I ought here to state that there are eminent naturalists (one of them of your own university) who accept the doctrine of evolution, but who think little of natural selection as a modus operandi in the diversification of species; and there

are distinguished writers, not naturalists, who, from other points of view are ready to accept "the doctrine of the successive evolution from ancestral germs of higher and higher forms of life and mind," while they profess to have buried the principle of natural selection and with it the Malthusian theory of population in one common grave. These are evolutionists, in their way, because the probability of evolutionary theories springs from the very various lines of facts, otherwise inexplicable, which they harmonize and explain:-in geology, the previous existence of forms more and more like those now existing, and at length coalescing in them; in geography, the actual distribution of species and genera over the earth's surface; in systematic natural history, the reason why species and genera and orders are so variously related, are here connected by transitions and there separated by wide gaps; in morphology why the same functions may be assumed by different organs, or the same kind of organ may perform here one function and there another, or again exist as a vestige, of no service at all; in anatomy and biology, the transition from one element of structure to another, the gradual

* Bowen in "The North American Review," November, 1879.

specialization of organs, and the remarkable coincidence between the order of the development in the individual animal and that of the rise from low to high in the scale of being, and that of the successive appearance of the grades in time; finally in psychology, the gradations between beings endowed with rudimentary sensation and beings endowed with mind.

Here, where the "touch of Nature makes the whole world kin," we reach the sensitive point. Man, while on the one side a wholly exceptional being, is on the other an object of natural history, - a part of the animal kingdom. If you agree with Quatrefages that man is a kingdom by himself, you must agree with him that this kingdom is solely intellectual; that he is as certainly and completely an animal as he is certainly something more. We are sharers not only of animal but of vegetable life, sharers with the higher brute animals in common instincts and feelings and affections. It seems to me that there is a sort of meanness in the wish to ignore the tie. I fancy that human beings may be more humane when they realize that, as their dependent associates live a life in which man has a share, so they have rights which man is bound to respect.

Man, in short, is a partaker of the natural as well as of the spiritual. And the evolutionist may say with the apostle: "Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual." Man, "formed of the dust of the ground," endowed with "the breath of life," "became a living soul." Is there any warrant for affirming that these processes were instantaneous ?

As has just been intimated, the characteristic of that particular theory of evolution which is now in the ascendant is that, by taking advantage of "every creature's best" for bettering conditions, it has made strife work for good, throughout an immensely long line of adjustments and readjustments, in a series ascending as it advanced; that it supposes a process, not from discord to harmony, but from simpler to fuller and richer harmonies, conserving throughout the best adaptations to the then existing conditions. So while its advocates nowhere contemplate a state

"When Nature underneath a heap,

Of jarring atoms lay,

And could not heave her head,"

they may appropriate Dryden's closing lines,

"From harmony, from heavenly harmony,

This universal frame began,
From harmony to harmony

Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in man.”

I have now indicated, at more than sufficient length for one discourse, some of the principal recent changes and present tendencies in scientific belief, especially in biology. Even the most advanced of the views here presented are held by very many scientific men, - some as established truths, some as probable opinions. There is a class, moreover, by whom all these scientific theories, and more, are held as ascertained facts, and as the basis of philosophical inferences which strike at the root of theistic beliefs.

It remains to consider what attitude thoughtful men and Christian believers should take respecting them, and how they stand related to beliefs of another order. That will be the topic of a following lecture.