harm for the future.  And if natural selection, with artificial to help it, will produce better animals and better men than the present, and fit them better to the conditions of existence, why, let it work, say we, to the top of its bent There is still room enough for improvement.  Only let us hope that it always works for good:  if not, the divergent lines on Darwin’s lithographic diagram of “Transmutation made Easy,” ominously show what small deviations from the straight path may come to in the end.

The prospect of the future, accordingly, is on the whole pleasant and encouraging.  It is only the backward glance, the gaze up the long vista of the past, that reveals anything alarming.  Here the lines converge as they recede into the geological ages, and point to conclusions which, upon the theory, are inevitable, but hardly welcome.  The very first step backward makes the negro and the Hottentot our blood-relations—­not that reason or Scripture objects to that, though pride may.  The next suggests a closer association of our ancestors of the olden time with “our poor relations” of the quadrumanous family than we like to acknowledge.  Fortunately, however—­even if we must account for him scientifically —­man with his two feet stands upon a foundation of his own.  Intermediate links between the Bimana and the Quadrumana are lacking altogether; so that, put the genealogy of the brutes upon what footing you will, the four-handed races will not serve for our forerunners—­at least, not until some monkey, live or fossil, is producible with great-toes, instead of thumbs, upon his nether extremities; or until some lucky geologist turns up the bones of his ancestor and prototype in France or England, who was so busy “napping the chuckie-stanes” and chipping out flint knives and arrow-heads in the time of the drift, very many ages ago—­before the British Channel existed, says Lyell [III-1]—­and until these men of the olden time are shown to have worn their great-toes in the divergent and thumblike fashion.  That would be evidence indeed:  but, until some testimony of the sort is produced, we must needs believe in the separate and special creation of man, however it may have been with the lower animals and with plants.

No doubt, the full development and symmetry of Darwin’s hypothesis strongly suggest the evolution of the human no less than the lower animal races out of some simple primordial animal—­that all are equally “lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited.”  But, as the author speaks disrespectfully of spontaneous generation, and accepts a supernatural beginning of life on earth, in some form or forms of being which included potentially all that have since existed and are yet to be, he is thereby not warranted to extend his inferences beyond the evidence or the fair probability.  There seems as great likelihood that one special origination should be followed by another upon fitting occasion