fancy picture of the development of things, not dependent upon observation of facts at all, but wholly evolved, like the German thinker’s camel, out of its author’s own pregnant inner consciousness.  The Roman poet would no doubt have built an excellent superstructure if he had only possessed a little straw to make his bricks of.  As it was, however, scientific brick-making being still in its infancy, he could only construct in a day a shadowy Aladdin’s palace of pure fanciful Epicurean phantasms, an imaginary world of imaginary atoms, fortuitously concurring out of void chaos into an orderly universe, as though by miracle.  It is not thus that systems arise which regenerate the thought of humanity; he who would build for all time must make sure first of a solid foundation, and then use sound bricks in place of the airy nothings of metaphysical speculation.

It was in the last century that the evolutionary idea really began to take form and shape in the separate conceptions of Kant, Laplace, Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin.  These were the true founders of our modern evolutionism.  Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were the Joshuas who led the chosen people into the land which more than one venturous Moses had already dimly descried afar off from the Pisgah top of the eighteenth century.

Kant and Laplace came first in time, as astronomy comes first in logical order.  Stars and suns, and planets and satellites, necessarily precede in development plants and animals.  You can have no cabbages without a world to grow them in.  The science of the stars was therefore reduced to comparative system and order, while the sciences of life, and mind, and matter were still a hopeless and inextricable muddle.  It was no wonder, then, that the evolution of the heavenly bodies should have been clearly apprehended and definitely formulated while the evolution of the earth’s crust was still imperfectly understood, and the evolution of living beings was only tentatively and hypothetically hinted at in a timid whisper.

In the beginning, say the astronomical evolutionists, not only this world, but all the other worlds in the universe, existed potentially, as the poet justly remarks, in ‘a haze of fluid light,’ a vast nebula of enormous extent and almost inconceivable material thinness.  The world arose out of a sort of primitive world-gruel.  The matter of which it was composed was gas, of such an extraordinary and unimaginable gasiness that millions of cubic miles of it might easily be compressed into a common antibilious pill-box.  The pill-box itself, in fact, is the net result of a prolonged secular condensation of myriads of such enormous cubes of this primaeval matter.  Slowly setting around common centres, however, in anticipation of Sir Isaac Newton’s gravitative theories, the fluid haze gradually collected into suns and stars, whose light and heat is presumably due to the clashing together of their component atoms as they fall perpetually towards the central mass.