highest organizations passes through an evolution similar to that of the animal creation.  Professor Martins—­a leading French scientist and an evolutionist—­says of Agassiz:  “Another of these precursors of modern science is Louis Agassiz.  The oldest fossil forms have a simpler organization than the later ones, and represent some stage of the embryonic development of the latter.  This truth, established by Agassiz, has, more than any other, enlightened the history of creation, and prepared for the generalization by which the whole may be comprehended.  The oldest fishes known are all more or less related to the sharks and skates; their teeth and scales only, with small portions of the skeleton, have been preserved.  Their form, widely different from that of the living species, recalls that of the embryo of our living fishes.  This is a truth which Louis Agassiz was the first to proclaim to the scientific world."[1]

[Footnote 1:  De l’Origine du Monde organique.]

But, beyond this question as to the evidence of mutability of species which Agassiz did not find, he took the position “that the hypothesis of the method of creation by evolution exceeded physical science and became theology, which belonged to the province of theology, into which he had no intention of venturing.”  That was his statement to me during the interval between the two attacks of brain trouble from the latter of which he died.  Science, to his understanding, was observation and classification, arrangement, and it had no function in investigating the causes or modus operandi through which things became what they were.

Amongst the evolutionists whom I have known there have been several who did not accept without modification the theory of natural selection, and supplemented it by design, amongst whom I may mention the great American botanist, Asa Gray,—­one of the most distinguished of Darwinians,—­who accepted the method of evolution as the modus operandi of the Supreme Intelligence.  Professor Jeffries Wyman, the associate of Agassiz in the University, who was one of the doctors of our Adirondack company, accepted in a qualified manner the theory of evolution, but his premature and lamented death set the seal to his conclusions before they were complete, though I have always had the impression that his position was similar to that of Gray.  To my question one day as to his conclusions, he replied, with a caution characteristic of the man and very unlike the resolute attitude of Agassiz before the question which the Sphinx proposes still, “An evolution of some sort there certainly was,” but nothing more would he say.  The loss to American science in his death can never be estimated, for his mind was of that subtle and inductive nature which is needed for such a study, fine to poetic delicacy, penetrating with all the acumen of a true scientific imagination, but modest to excess, and personally so attached to Agassiz that he would with reluctance give expression to a difference