chance because its short movement gives us no time for observation and calculation. It falls by chance because, its results being unimportant to us, we give no heed to the details of its motion. But as the hairs of our head are all numbered, so are numbered all the gyrations and undulations of every chance autumn leaf. All processes in the universe are alike natural. The creation of man or the growth of a state is as natural as the formation of an apple or the growth of a snow-bank. All are alike supernatural, for they all rest on the huge unseen solidity of the universe, the imperishability of matter and the immanence of law.

We sometimes classify sciences as exact and inexact, in accordance with our ability exactly to weigh forces and results. The exact sciences deal with simple data accessible and capable of measurement. The results of their interactions can be reduced to mathematics. Because of their essential simplicity, the mathematical sciences have been carried to great comparative perfection. It is easier to weigh an invisible planet than to measure the force of heredity in a grain of corn. The sciences of life are inexact, because the human mind can never grasp all their data. Nor has the combined effort of all men, the flower of the altruism of the ages, that we call science been able to make more than a beginning in this study. But however incomplete our realization of the laws of life, we may be sure that they are never broken. Each law is the expression of the best possible way in which causes and results can be linked. It is the necessary sequence of events, therefore the best sequence, if we may imagine for a moment that the human words “good” and “bad” are applicable to world-processes. The laws of nature are not executors of human justice. Each one has its own operation, and no other. Each represents its own tendency towards cosmic order. A law in this sense cannot be “broken.” A broken law would be a discarded universe. “If God should wink at a single act of injustice,” says the Arab proverb, “the whole universe would shrivel up like a cast-off snake-skin.” If God should wink at any violated law the universe would vanish.

Not long ago, in an examination in a theological seminary, the question was asked of the candidates for the ministry, “Is it right to pray for a change of season?” The candidates thought that it was not, for the relations which produce winter and summer are fixed in the structure of the solar system and cannot be altered for man’s pleasure or man’s need. “Is it right to pray for rain?” The candidates generally thought that it was, because the conditions of rain are so unstable that a little change in one way or another would bring rain or fair weather, and that it was proper to ask for such change, as it did not concern the economy of the universe.

The third question was: “When the signal service of the United States is well established, so that weather conditions are perfectly known, will it then be right to pray for rain?” And the candidates for the ministry could not tell, for they began to see that even simple changes of weather may have the strength of the whole universe behind them. It has never yet rained when by any possibility it could do otherwise. It has never failed to rain when rain was possible. The Spanish padres in California, wise in their generation, allowed prayers for rain only in winter, when the wind was in the south. The wind is only in the south when the air is affected by a cyclonic movement, and this in the California winter means rain.

We hear good men say sometimes that the crying need of this strong and sceptical age is that it may see some law of nature definitely broken, that it may rain when rain is impossible, or that some burning bush may, unconsuming, proclaim that the force which is behind all law is also above it and can break or repeal all laws at will.

Emerson somewhere speaks of the purpose in life—“To be sound and solvent.” As his life was in all ways “sound and solvent,” perhaps such rule of conduct was his own. But one may say, That is only a rule. The man himself should be all rules and requirements of his own establishment. Let Mr. Emerson show that his life is above his principles. Let him break these rules. Let him be “unsound and insolvent” for a time. Then only will his greatness appear.

The laws of nature are the expression of the infinite soundness and solvency. They will not be broken, nor through their unsoundness and insolvency will the “heavens roll away as a scroll,” nor “the universe shrivel up as a cast-off snake-skin.”

In the growing recognition of law has been the progress of science. From the casting aside of human notions of chance and whim the “warfare of science” has had its rise. For every event carried over into the realm of law some man has given his life. As the Panama railroad is said to have cost the life of a man for every cross-tie, so has every step in the progress of science. And such men!

Many a time in the growth of humanity has it been necessary that the wisest, clearest, most humane, should die on the stake or the gibbet or the cross, that men should come to realize the power of an idea; that they should know the value of truth.

Evolution as a Theory of Organic Development, or Darwinism. In a different sense the word evolution is applied to the theory of the origin of organs and of species by divergence and development. This theory teaches that all forms of life now existing or that have existed on the earth have sprung from a common stock, which has undergone change in a multitude of ways and under varied conditions, the forces and influences producing such change being known as the “factors of organic evolution.” All characters and attributes of species and groups have developed with changing conditions of life. The homologies among animals are the result of common descent. The differences are due to various influences, chief among these being competition in the struggle for existence between individuals and between species, whereby those best adapted to their surroundings lived and reproduced their kind.

This theory is now the central axis of all biological investigation in all its branches, from ethics to histology, from anthropology to bacteriology. In the light of this theory every peculiarity of structure, every character or quality of individual or species, has a meaning and a cause. It is the work of the investigator to find this meaning as well as to record the fact. “One of the noblest lessons left to the world” by Darwin is this, Mr. Frank Cramer tells us,—“this, which to him amounted to a profound, almost religious, conviction, that every fact in nature, no matter how insignificant, every stripe of color, every tint of flowers, the length of an orchid’s nectary, unusual height in a plant, all the infinite variety of apparently insignificant things, is full of significance. For him it was an historical record, the revelation of a cause, the lurking-place of a principle.”

According to the theory of evolution every structure of to-day finds its meaning in some condition of the past. The inside of an animal tells what it really is, for it bears the record of heredity. The outside of an animal tells where its ancestors have been, for it bears record of concessions to environment. Similarity in essential structure is known as homology. By the theory of evolution homology, wherever it is found, is proof of blood-relationship.

The theory of organic evolution through natural law was first placed on a stable footing by the observations and inductions of Darwin. It has therefore been long known as Darwinism, although that term has been usually associated with the recognition of natural selection as the great motive power in organic change. Darwinism was at first regarded as