to speak of heat rays. The ether is never heated, no matter how much energy there may be in it. Similarly the inductive lines or rays from an electrified body represent transformed electrical motions, and such effects of electricity ought not to be confounded with electricity. One difficulty that has been felt by many about the fluid hypothesis or any other, has been on account of the dual character known as positive and negative. That difficulty may be made to disappear by considering the character of the motion to be of the nature of a rotation. Imagine an endless rope as representing an electric circuit. At any point in it let it be twisted by the hands. It will be seen to have a right-handed twist traveling in one direction and a left-handed twist in the opposite direction, and each through the whole length of the rope, both co-existing without interference, yet nothing but simple rotation can be seen at any particular point. Call the right-handed rotation positive and the left-handed negative, and you have both an analogical phenomenon and the nomenclature. There is then no necessity for assuming either a fluid or anything more mysterious about electricity than there is about heat. These dynamical principles are not only a distinct gain to science, but they are of such a character as to give delight to the thoughtful man as a part of the riches of nature's warehouse of which Bacon speaks. They give to one the prospect of the order of nature and add to the sovereignty of

man.

VIII.

THE EVOLUTION OF CHARACTER.

BY JOSHUA G. FITCH, LL.D., HER MAJESTY'S CHIEF INSPECTOR OF TRAINING COLLEGES, LONDON.

In the great Natural History Museum in London, there are illustrations, collected from all lands, of the different forms of animal life, from the tiniest insect to the ichthyosaurus; and in all the halls of that vast and varied collection, there is but one representation of man himself. It is a sitting figure in marble of Charles Darwin. Many naturalists before him had investigated the phenomena of the animal kingdom, and sought to classify and describe its denizens; but to him it was given in a supreme degree to perceive the nature of animal and vegetable existenceand to trace some of the laws of its development. Other men may have dealt skillfully with problems of more or less ephemeral or local interest; with this or that particular country, literature, religion, or other special region of inquiry; but it was Darwin's vocation to search out the nature of life itself-to inquire into the laws of being, of growth, and of development in the animal and vegetable world. And these are subjects of profound and universal interest. They appeal to the living sympathies, the imagina

tion of all mankind and to the concern felt about the past and future of his race which characterizes, in various degrees, every intelligent being.

You are all probably familiar with the main items in the modern creed of evolution. Varieties and different species of animals and plants are not accounted for by the hypothesis of separate acts of creation, but are the product partly of the conditions of environment, and partly of natural selection. Certain organs and qualities become strengthened by exercise and more and more fully developed in successive generations; certain others become weakened by disuse, and gradually disappear or survive only in a rudimentary form. In the struggle for existence the weaker organisms are conquered, the stronger and the fitter prevail, and transmit their special qualities to posterity. Favorable variations in certain circumstances tend to be preserved and unfavorable to be destroyed, and the result of this struggle for existence is the formation from time to time of what are called new species and varieties.

Such are in briefest outline the generalizations to which the researches of biologists have at present led us. They may possibly be absorbed and superseded hereafter by some larger and more comprehensive inductions; but at present they are accepted by men of science at least as the best provisional hypothesis we possess for explaining the genesis of the various forms of organic life on the earth. And when once the student of Darwin's writings grasps the meaning of these simple statements, he begins to perceive that they are far-reaching, and applicable to many other departments of enquiry besides that

which concerns the lives of animals and plants. In Herbert Spencer's writings on sociology, you will find analogous methods of enquiry and of reasoning applied to the growth of laws and customs; to the history of institutions, to the development of our social and political life. These things have not been shaped by accident; they have not, so far as we can ascertain, had their forms consciously predetermined by any authority human or divine. They have become what they are by processes not unlike those which operate in the region of animated nature, by the conditions of existence, by climate, soil, circumstance; by the sort of motives which have determined the putting forth of energy; and by the direction in which that energy has exerted itself. Into this wide and fruitful region of speculation, we will not now attempt to travel. I am speaking to a body of teachers; and as teachers, the one subject of primary interest is the nature of the material on which they have to work-the mind, the character, the conduct of those whom they try to teach. And the question-the very limited and definite question-we have to ask is, What has the latest doctrine of scientific biology got to teach or to suggest to us? What analogies are there between the world of the naturalist and the world of the teacher? Can we get from the experience of the deep-sea explorer, of the physicist in his laboratory, or of the observer with his microscope, any practical counsels which will be of service to us in the manipulation of the finest piece of organism in the world, the character of a human being?

Before answering these questions we are con

fronted with one consideration which may well make us pause. Analogy is very interesting, but it may prove very misleading. We are not to mistake resemblances for identity. There is at least one remarkable difference in the conditions under which the observant teacher and the observant naturalist must work. In the animal and vegetable worlds, the separate organs and functions are all susceptible more or less of separate observation and of separate treatment. True, even here, there is what Darwin calls the "law of concomitant variations," in virtue of which change in one part of a complex structure is accompanied by certain marked and often unexpected changes in other parts. And this law actually holds good in a far higher degree in the region of mind than in that of organic matter. We may talk of attention, of memory and of imagination as if they were separate faculties, and when we are discussing the nature of the human mind, we may easily make each faculty the subject of a separate effort of thought. But we cannot experiment upon them separately, or see them at work independently, as a surgeon can treat the eye or the ear, or as a biologist can deal with a seedling or a nerve. The powers and functions of the human mind are so interwoven, that you cannot in practice treat them apart, or strongly influence any one of them without exerting an important reflex influence upon others. And hence the need of some caution when we are tempted to push too far the analogy between what goes on in the hothouse, the zoological gardens or the biological laboratory, and what goes on in the nursery or the school

room.