LECTURE V.

THE EYES OF EVOLUTION IN ITS FOREHEAD.

WE have so far studied the past and the present; we turn now to the future. Is it a closed book? I think not. In proportion to our accumulated knowledge of the laws of evolution, we can foresee what as yet is not fulfilled, but exists as a certainty involved in those laws. The power to prophesy belongs to all who possess facts with which to estimate. A false prophet is one who prejudges without data. Modern life is largely based in all its departments on this growing power of humanity. Political science is largely prognostication. Mercantile success depends on prevision and provision. Religion relies on known relations of vice to penal consequences, and of virtue to growth and peace, to forewarn us of what will be hereafter. Heaven and hell are tendencies, along which choice moves and moral results

accrue.

To comprehend humanity, we must not only know the history of its making, but the destiny involved in its making. The men of ten thousand years ago were not, in body or in mind, the same kind of men as exist to-day; it is equally certain that the men who will exist ten thousand years hence will be still farther removed from the primitive anthropoids. The changes that have gone on have followed ascertainable laws. The bones of the skull increased in number, the area of brain surface quadrupled, the tail aborted, by laws of exact causation. Nothing happened;

nor was there an arbitrary change at any point. Following these ascertained purposes and tendencies of evolution, we shall be able to look into the future.

1. While in our physical make-up there is much that is finished structurally, and completed functionally, man is pre-eminently an incomplete piece of work. In comparison with the tiger, his bones are rough, and his muscles lack lithesomeness and beauty. Physiologically from the condylarthra, our line of descent is not high. The apes are still near the marsupials in hand and feet. Using the brain, and moving on that line, the psychical power very early began to overshadow and lead to the neglect of the physical. It is clear that the brain began to develop at the expense of the rest of the body very early in the lemuridæ, ages before there was a true anthropoid. Our physical deficiencies thus became quite marked; and permanent disabilities mark our present condition. Woman has still to get along with the abdominal muscles that belonged to our ancestors before they rose from walking on four limbs; and in child-bearing she suffers sadly from lack of muscular support appropriate to a biped. Excreting in the lower races goes on through the skin in larger degree than in higher races. The kidneys belong to the list of supplementary adjustments. Yet these adjustments are incomplete in all organic relations.

The certainty of future structural modification seems unquestionable, Development is always along plastic lines of structure; man has such plastic lines. From the phenocodus the hippus moved away in the direction of speed and size. Its organic changes were all in that direction, until it had aborted four toes out of five, and its muscles were rendered as elastic as we find them in our racers. The bird, coming out of the old saurian stock, moved off with great gain in the way of aëration, and flexible vocal cords. By its power of flight it also became a cosmopolitan, and therewith secured a brain development proportionately

large. What follows? Evidently that the future modification of the horse must lie along its plastic lines of fleetness and strength; while that of the bird lies along those of music, wit, and flight. All movement is on the lines of least resistance; and evolution has thus fixed the lines of least resistance for horse and bird.

The plasticity of human development is in brain, voice, and hands; and in the increase and education of our senses. There is no chance of a better heart, or lungs, or for the most part any improvement of that large part of us that has become automatic and unconsciously operative. But how quickly the dull brain and facial lines of an Irishman leap to activity and harmony in the second generation, under the influence of freedom and social equality. The children of missionaries born in China approach in facial lines the Celestials. Our articulation changes organically according to use and climate. The hand has in it the future of man. Civilization has so far recognized only its obligation to the brain. The hands of our scholars are stupidly ignorant. The school of the future will recognize that man was the result not only of cerebral enlargement, but of liberated fore-limbs, and an articulating or language organ. Along these three plastic lines, and the ennoblement of our senses, will certainly lie man's further structural gains.

The marvelous enlargement of environments of a cosmical and microcosmical sort has brought the higher races more and more dominantly under the power of the brain. The tendency has long been for the brain to accumulate energy at the expense of the rest of the body. To despise the body has been a tenet of all controlling religions. Piety lay in belief and emotions of the brain. The doing of the hands was considered a matter of worldliness, or, at best, mere morals. The deterioration of civilized races has followed systematically; and we are just awakening to the fact that no high intellectual or moral power can be sus

tained without the body has well-distributed vigor and education. Probably our brain development and mental power are at, or near, their finality, with the average present bodily vigor. There must be a finer race of physical beings before the Psyche, that rests her foot on the brain, can take a higher flight.

The present evolution superinduced by man's own action tends not merely to the neglect of physical organs, but to their deterioration and ultimate destruction. The eye of civilization is not as perfect an organism as that with which wilder races scan sea and land. Civilization undoubtedly causes an average improvement up to a certain power; when degeneration sets in. This is owing to extreme demands made upon the eye under artificial and inferior lights, at hours when all organs are weary; and without provision for wisely guarding so delicate an organ. Short-sightedness is a general and growing disease of school-children. The more cultured races are characterized by the necessary use of spectacles. Humboldt tells us that when traveling in the Andes, his party was necessarily divided to examine opposite spurs of the mountainrange. As he approached the point where the two parties should converge, he could discover no signs of his friends, and expressed to the guides his fear that they were lost. The guides looked at him with surprise, and pointing across the valley said, "There they are." Humboldt still could see nothing but trees and rocks. However, taking his field-glass, and following the direction of his guides, he was able to distinguish the party on the opposite slope. He made sure of the reality of this extraordinary visual power, by causing the Indians to detail his friends' motions, while he observed them with his field-glass.

The sense of smell has been largely modified, and in some directions its power destroyed. I need not recount the story of the Australian who, on all fours, tracks his foe by the sense of smell like a dog. His alert, open nose

catches scents that wholly escape us. Civilization of even a low type begins the compressing of the nostrils, and changing the organ to an intellectual feature. The Grecian or Roman nose indicates less alertness, less range of nature, and is more an indicator of reflection and introversion. Noses obey not merely sensations, but respond to the highest perceptions and hopes. Meanwhile, we can doubtless detect refined and delicate odors that the Australian can not. He lives by his nose; we enjoy by our noses.

The actual destruction of an organ, or a functional power, is very improbable in a highly organized creature. Nature is more likely to readjust and readapt an organ to a new range of power. In the heads of certain lizards are found the vestiges of an eye that was in use millions of years ago, but the demands of life required a better eye in a different position. The old eye was allowed to shrink into a vestige, the orifice of vision was closed, and the whole affair apparently forgotten. Not quite however, for anatomy now reveals to us this nerveless organ of vision, and helps us, by means of it, to see the distant past.

So far Nature, in its struggle to adjust us to the universe about us, has given us five distinct methods of sensation, and therewith organs of a specific sort. Life existed on our planet for over two hundred millions of years before there was a head at all. Sensation, however, existed all along the line. There was the equivalent of our five senses in a diffused sense power. But it took all those millions of years to concentrate and difference sensation into senses; to collect the senses into headquarters; to get light and sound into a hole; and nerves pushed up to the front, to take the reports that came in. But the first eye was clear inside the head, and existed only as a ganglion of seeing nerves. Touch still remains as a general and only partially specialized sense.

Sir William Thompson suggests that we are acquiring a new function of sensation, which he terms the electric.