erally accepted as historic fact. If, on the other hand, unscientific minds not possessed of any supposed revelation in regard to the date of the world's origin, thought of the universe as eternal, that eternity was still conceived as an eternity of unhistoric monotony. The scientific mind sees in the present condition of the universe the monuments of a long history of progress. The third of these ideas is the unity of the universe. To the unscientific mind the universe is a chaos. To the scientific mind it becomes a cosmos. To the unscientific mind, the processes of nature seem to be the result of forces mutually independent and often discordant. Polytheism in religion is the natural counterpart of the unscientific view of the universe. To the scientific mind, the boundless complexity of the universe is dominated by a supreme unity. One system of law, intelligible, formulable, pervades the universe, through all its measureless extension in space and time. The student of science may be theist or pantheist, atheist or agnostic; polytheist he can never be. What then, let us ask ourselves, has been the contribution of our century to the development of these three ideas, which characterize the scientific view of nature:the spatial extension of the universe, the historic extension of the universe, and the unity of the universe. The development of the idea of the extension of the universe in space belongs mainly to earlier times than ours. The Greek geometers acquired approximately correct notions of the size of the earth and the distance of the moon. The Copernican astronomy in the Sixteenth century shifted the center of the solar system from the earth to the sun, and placed in truer perspective our view of the celestial spheres. But, though astronomy, the oldest of the sisterhood of the sciences, attained a somewhat mature development centuries ago, it has in our own century thrown new light upon the subject of the vastness of the universe. The discovery of Neptune has greatly increased the area of the solar system; the measurement of the parallax of a few of the brightest, and presumably the nearest, of the stars has rendered far more definite our knowledge of the magnitude of the stellar universe; and telescopes of higher magnifying power than had been used before have resolved many clusters of small and distant stars. If the development of the idea of the spatial extension of the universe belongs mainly to an earlier period, the idea of its historic extension belongs mainly to our century. It is true, indeed, that Pythagoras and others of the ancient philosophers did not fail to recognize indications of change in the surface of the earth. And, in the beginning of the Renaissance, we find Leonardo da Vinci and others insisting that the fossils discovered in excavations in the stratified rocks were proof of the former existence of a sea teeming with marine life, where cultivated lands and populous cities had taken its place. Hutton's "Theory of the Earth," which in an important sense marks the beginning of modern geological theorizing, appeared in the Edinburgh "Philosophical Transactions" in 1788, but was not published as a separate work till seven years later. Not till 1815 was published William Smith's Geological Map of England, the first example of systematic stratigraphic work extended over any large area. To the beginning of our century belong also the classical and epoch-making researches of Cuvier upon the fossil fauna of the Paris basin. By far the larger part, therefore, of the development of geologic science, with its farreaching revelations of continental emergence and submergence, mountain growth and decay, and evolution and extinction of successive faunas and floras, belongs to the Nineteenth century. Far on into our century extended the conflict with theological conservatism, in which the elder Silliman, James L. Kingsley, and others of the early members of our Academy bore an honorable part, and which ended in the recognition, by the general public, as well as by the select circle of scientific students, of an antiquity of the earth far transcending the limits allowed by venerable tradition. To our century also belongs chiefly the development in astronomy of the idea of the history of the solar system. It is, indeed, true that, in the conception of the nebular hypothesis, Laplace, whose "Théorie de la Monde" was published in 1796, was preceded by Kant and Swedenborg. But the credit of a discovery belongs not so much to the first conception of an idea as to its development into a formation of our time were the twin papers of Darwin and Wallace, wherein was promulgated the theory of natural selection. And yet, of course, the idea of evolution was not new, when these papers were presented to the Linnæan Society. Consciously or unconsciously, the aim of science at all times must have been to bring events that seemed isolated into a continuous development. To exclude the idea of evolution from any class of phenomena, is to exclude that class of phenomena from the realm of science. In the former half of our century, evolutionary conceptions of the history of inorganic nature had become pretty well established. The nebular hypothesis was obviously a theory of planetary evolution. The Lyellian geology, which took the place of the catastrophism of the last century, was the conception of evolution applied to the physical history of the earth. Nor had there been wanting anticipations of evolution within the realm of biology. The author of that sublime Hebrew psalm of creation preserved to us as the first chapter of Genesis, was in his way a good deal of an evolutionist. "Let the earth bring forth,"" let the waters bring forth,"-are words that point to a process of growth rather than to a process of manufacture in the origination of living beings. In crude and vague forms, the idea of evolution was held by some of the Greek philosophers. Just at the beginning of our century Lamarck developed the idea of evolution into something like a scientific theory. Yet it is no less true that the epoch of evolution in human thought began with Darwin. Manifold suggestions there were of genetic relationships between different organisms, whether organic forms were studied by the systematist or the embryologist, the geographer or the paleontologist; but each and all found the path to any credible theory of organic evolution blocked by the stubborn fact that variations in species appeared everywhere to be limited in degree, and to oscillate about a central average type, instead of becoming cumulative from generation to generation. In the Darwinian principle of natural selection, for the first time, was suggested a force, whose existence in nature could not be doubted, and whose tendency, conservative in stable environment, progressive in changing environment, would account at once for the permanence of species through long ages, and for epochs of relatively rapid change. However Darwin's work may be discredited by the exaggerations of Weismannism, however it may be minified by Neo-Lamarckians, it is the theory of natural selection which has so nearly removed the barrier in the path of evolution, impassable before, as to lead, first the scientific world, and later the world of thought in general, to a substantially unanimous belief in the derivative origin of species. Certain it is that no discovery since Newton's discovery of universal gravitation has produced so profound an effect upon the intellectual life of mankind. The tombs of Newton and Darwin lie close. together in England's Valhalla, and together their names must stand as the two great epoch-making names in the history of science. Darwin's discovery relates primarily to the origin of species by descent with modification from preëxisting species. It throws no direct light upon the question of the origin of life. But analogy is a guide that we may reasonably follow in our thinking, provided only we bear in mind that she is a treacherous guide and sometimes leads astray. Conclusions that rest only on analogy must be held tentatively and not dogmatically. Yet it would be an unreasonable excess of caution that would refuse to recognize the direction in which analogy points. When we trace a continuous evolution from the nebula to the dawn of life, and again a continuous evolution from the dawn of life to the varied flora and fauna of to-day, crowned with glory by the appearance of man himself, we can hardly fail to accept the suggestion that the transition from the lifeless to the living was itself a process of evolution. Though the supposed instances of spontaneous generation all resolve themselves into errors of experimentation, though the power of chemical synthesis, in spite of the vast progress it has made, stops far short of the complexity of protoplasm, though we must confess ourselves unable to imagine any hypothesis for the origin of that complex apparatus which the microscope is revealing to us in the infinitesimal laboratory of the cell, are we not compelled to believe that the law of continuity has not been. Broken, and that a probable theory of the method of nat |