Initiative in Evolution

he globe. The zoologists have gone so far as to confer upon him the surname Sapiens—Homo Sapiens. Learned indeed he is, and heir of all

cure in the knowledge that he is studying some portion of a chain of life stretching back for incalculable ages, and is not careful to produce those missing links demanded by the once formidable foes of his fundamental principle. Haeckel may announce that Pithecanthropus Erectus of Dubois is truly

g from known phenomena to the unknown, or, more precisely, from

and pass on—all our knowledge is provisional and imperfec

ritten records the lineal descendant of the bards and annalists collects his scanty authorities and compiles his story from them from beginning to

e and assumed his Greek title, Enquirer, Student of facts, Man of research. He is now nothing if not a man of science as well as of letters. With a wealth of documents within his reach so great that the 3239 Vatican cases full of them formed by no means the richest collec-tion in the archives of Europe, he pr

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orkers, conveniently called biologists. Though the study of human history by documents is an essential part of the historical method and the student may read his subject backwards, this would not of itself warrant the technical biologist in doing so, even though he be a child of Nature and part of her—“Nature’s insurgent son.” But some ref

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eir main rise from the work of Malthus on Human Popula-tion, and of variation from domesticated animals and plants, and this is true also of W

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pursued by himself and other great ones, and where it led them. Commencing with the Pleistocene period and passing through Neocene and Eocene periods through the Mesozoic Era and its cretaceous, jurassic and triassic systems to the Newer Pal?ozoic Era and its Permian, carboniferous, and Devonian systems, the older Pal?ozoic Era and its Silurian Ordovician and Cambrian systems, he reaches the unknown. But before all this patient research and its record is reached he treats, as he must, of consolida-tion and altera-tion of strata, of petrifica-tion of organic remains, elevation of strata, horizont

e matters of fact and their interpreta-tion contained in the following chapters, so that from time to time I

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rpret the physical features, habits, manners, customs and rites of an African tribe. Without such prior knowledge he would find it a profitless task to j

em such as the writer of Sava

rces of

and seekers in the plains of Bengal were familiar with much of their great sacred and composite river as it flowed into its delta. Slowly, laboriously, here a little and there a little, they learned its stupendous story. They found the plateau of Tibet in the Himalayas where the twin-sisters, Brahmaputra and Ganges were born, and saw how from the one high cradle they parted on their eastward course for a thousand miles with the mountain-chain between them, and how, coming together again, the one descending through Assam a

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his fitness to enter a family which was able to produce a stray peer of the realm in its roll. On the other hand a man who has lost his parents in childhood may know nothing of them but that his father’s name was A. Mann, and that he wa

t further he may go, and from the Heralds’ College fi

on of a

d, or on the other from a strange perversion of mind of the confessing person which is well enough known to forensic medicine. You may thus bring home to the accused his guilt by the method of the annalist. Or you ma

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may well concl

ent product of human art seemed to speak to me on the subject of my musings. Perhaps if Huxley could extract from a piece of chalk or lumps of coal two magnificent expositions on

l it. The cord was as good as if just made, slender, strong, twisted, with some glazing on the twisted threads. It showed three main bundles, and each of these was composed of two smaller ones. The substance of all these six was found when examined with a lens to consist of minute silky fibres varying from a quarter of an inch to an inch in length.

ng. I could also see that this same mind had seen it better to divide each of these strands into two yarns before the final twisting, and that in framing the yarns the silky fibres of the plant had been squeezed together by some powerful agency and yet not disintegrated, and that the finished product had been immersed in a protective substance which gave it a slight glaze. In short, I, though a child in these matters, read much of the story of this cord in terms of mind dealing with give

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led” or combed, how “tow” is separated from “line,” and how the yarns are pressed together and twisted, how they are at first rough and bristly, and are then dressed, polished, and “sized” with such a starch as that of the potato. When I proceed to ask him about the plant itself his interest flags, and he becomes vague. He says, “You had better ask the Head, young Mr. X., he knows these thi

enta-tion or “retting” in water, how they are again beaten in a “break,” then rubbed and “scutched,” and finally “heckled” or combed; and, as to analytic chemistry, he tells me that the chief constituent is cellulose. This quest is now over and I know much I could not find out by the backward method, though the dependence of its rival upon the presence of honest