believes that he is derived not from dust, but from some low form of life? Dust forms no term of comparison between a pristine and a present state of existence. All things being possible with God, man could as well have been created out of nothing as out of dust, and might have been created thus, such as gradual development might otherwise have formed him. If, however, he did but know that what most comports with his dignity is recognition of the truth, and if it be given him to perceive in at least one point the grade from which he has risen, he possesses a term of comparison which may well entitle him to look forward to the future of the race as of relative splendor almost inconceivable.

CHAPTER VI.

PHENOMENA OF EVOLUTION IN THE PRESENT ERA.

AN has long been known as an anthropomorphic being,

MAN

one who has fashioned God after his own mental and moral attributes, who, according to a doctrine which may now be considered beyond resurrection, doubtless growing out of literal construction of words in Genesis, once even went the length of believing that God is of human form. Yet it ought to be evident that man can be in only a very different and in an infinitely remote sense made after God's image and likeness.

The degree to which man has shown his anthropomorphism has never been partially realized until the present century, when science for the first time showed that even the limited part of creation around him on earth was not made exclusively for his delectation, but that the lowliest animals are organized, not as ministers to his needs and pleasures, but with reference to their own well-being. Even the insects, the aphides, which seem to be the veriest slaves to their ant-masters, who milk them of their nutritive juices, are really so organized that it is as agreeable to them to be milked as to their masters to milk them.

The theory, accepted for ages, that all things on earth had been made for the behoof of man, would have received a rude shock if it had been pushed to its logical conclusion. Wild animals drew for a long period quite a large amount of sustenance from his capture. Within easy recollection the tiger in India, and the lion in North Africa, have depopulated whole districts, while the death-rate in India from poisonous snakes reached, in 1877, the frightful number of 16,777 persons. The familiarity of insects, too, with the delicate cuticle of man was

not conducive to his claim to being sole lord of creation, seeing that the insignificant creatures drive him out of some parts of the world, and that his precautions must be ceaseless to keep them even out of his bed. Unavailingly, however, was all this, as patent as it is now, until science proved conclusively that every creature had been created solely for its own good. Now, despite the fact that some books on natural history for the young still maintain the old point of view, as that the bee, for instance, was made to place in hives along hedge-rows, as the producer of food for man, the fountain-heads of knowledge flow in other directions, and will soon leave dry these stagnant pools of information.

Man stood at one time, in his own estimation, in the centre of all things. Not only did the sun and moon, according to his way of thinking, roll around him, to give him light by day and night, but the whole starry firmament, containing suns which dwarf our central luminary by comparison, also rolled around him, to shape the horoscope of his natal days, and to charm his fancy with imaginings of music of the spheres, while comets and eclipses served no other purpose but that of portents and presages of his fate. Science has, certainly, if it has done nothing more, accomplished a good work in taking man down a few pegs in his own estimation. He is still, even in the midst of a leveling civilization, sufficiently puffed up in his own estimation; but he is now modesty itself compared with his former self, although he is far more worthy. It is comparatively a mere trifle to culminate as he now does in mutual admiration societies, in English, French, German, New England, and other dinners, where he worships himself through his forefathers. At least, he has happily lost the supreme arrogance with which he once perched on the summit of things, and crowed his contentment at having reached the pinnacle, for he has now set himself to learn what he thought he knew.

The perception of evolution of all existing things is ever obscured through lack of perspective. Happy would it be, however, if such parts as are faintly visible could be viewed and described as they seem, without the everlasting suspicion that its portrayal indicates desire to praise at the expense of the present the times that are past. To declare any one a praiser of by-gone times is supposed by the unthinking to constitute an unanswerable argument, praise of anything that is past being supposed to convey disparagement of everything in the present. Of such airy nothings are the words which often present themselves as reason. But let it be noted that, to deride one who praises things of the past, as compared with certain phases of the same things within the present, implies that, in all things, at every period, the world has progressed up to that point in everything, and never has in anything retrograded, and this is an untenable proposition, as can be proved by the single instance of the Dark Ages, covering a multitude of retrogressions. A bird's-eye view of present civilization, while it shows us an aggregate of wide-spread liberality of thought, and of tenderness for the weak and oppressed and suffering, and of individual and organized effort for succor and relief, shows us also at the foundation of society a weakness of principle in financial matters unknown within historical times, and simultaneously a loosening of the family tie, associated with an erotic license with which, whether as cause, effect, or concomitant, it goes hand in hand. If it be ever possible to reach perception of effect as derived from cause, it would seem here as if the greatest of all the agencies at work, amid the multifarious ones that go toward producing any effect, is the sudden influx of wealth and luxury to thousands of persons, who, reared in penury, or in the most modest circumstances, could not safely reach at a bound suddenly changed conditions. Although not generally recognized, here is plainly to be seen the working

of the law of the survival of the fittest, for luxury has its victims from prodigality of all sorts, in health and money, who go down in the battle of life as surely stricken as in war.

At a time when the greatest general sense of justice that has ever been exhibited is engaged in ameliorating the condition of the poor, declaring that the laborer is worthy of his hire, and philanthropy, going beyond this, seeks to educate him, and to succor him when needy and when sick, the laborer himself, in instances so numerous as to tend to repress the sympathy which has gone out toward him, makes claims and demonstrations of force which have on occasions paralyzed the industries by which he lives, and withdrawn from the coffers of the State moneys for whose reimbursement he must contribute from his scanty stock. In this country, America, where the shoes in which men walk freely are so big that they never pinch, even organized anarchy has presumed to take disruptive part against a governmental scheme which it had not part nor lot in framing,-a governmental scheme which professes to permit to every man to become that to which he is entitled by nature and his own deserts.

In this democratic America, where only a few years ago the tail of the British lion used to be twisted on the Fourth of July and other high-days and holidays, and the public prints never tired of descanting on effete European monarchies and the absurdities of titular rank, valuable invoices of American girls yearly go to supply foreign needs, so that the day may come when the New Zealander, sitting on the broken arch of London bridge to view the ruins of St. Paul's, may find among the neighboring drift a stratum rich in specimens of an extinct female American type, associated with collapsed money-bags, while the opposite shores of the Atlantic may show contemporaneous deposits of banjos and microcephalous dudes. These, mingled with crania evidencing a highly-intellectual status of