affected, that is to say, they are more or less conscious, more or less able to resist their impulses. The hypothesis of determinism cannot make us forget all the visible shades of difference between the normal individual and the typical madman. The normal man receives varied impressions, external and internal; some impel him to action, others hold him back: he establishes an equilibrium. Normal life is nothing but that,—a state of equilibrium, a static condition. The man who is termed abnormal is, on the contrary, more or less constantly out of balance. He is impelled by one force that is not counterbalanced by another: he falls. When the wind blows always from the same direction upon a row of pines, it bends them all in the same direction. If the wind, though violent, blows alternately from opposite directions, the trees remain erect. These rows of pines will provide us, not with the image, but with the schema of the normal and the abnormal man. Neither one nor the other,—and the man as little as the tree,—is responsible either for the origin, or the power, or the direction of the wind which bends them and straightens them in turn or, on the contrary, breaks them forever as if they were mere reeds; there remains however, the fact, that while the one kept itself erect in a healthy posture, despite occasionally rude shocks, the other, subjected to a constant pressure, bent over from day to day with its head nearer to the ground, or even, as the result of a more than usually violent tempest, broke altogether.

It is a fact, and one must keep it in mind when he passes judgment upon trees or upon men. It is a fact, and that is all. Nevertheless, if the tree has been uprooted by a violent tempest, there is nothing left but to call the wood-cutters, who are the judges of trees. If they inquire into the cause of the disaster, it will be through pure curiosity; their business does not lie there; they know their duty and will perform it.

When we shall have exhausted all the arguments for and against all the degrees of responsibility that may be discovered in a healthy or a sick person, we shall find ourselves in agreement with the social wood-cutters, with the magistrates, on the necessity of removing and forever ridding society of him. Then, having once more become philosophers, we shall try to reach agreement upon this point: that it is a matter not of administering punishment but of preserving ourselves; our interest should be centered not upon the author, but the purpose of the crime. Let us not even speak of crime; let us speak of danger. Ah! How simple it all would be, or at least more simple than at present, if the notion of criminal act was superseded by that of dangerous act. The idea of crime is a metaphysical idea; the idea of danger is a social idea. The opinions of MM. Baudin, Faguet and de Fleury, which frighten M. Grasset, are in principle highly acceptable. On the occasion of each new crime society cannot institute a new philosophical debate nor set about resolving questions which, ever since there have been men who think, have troubled human thought. For some time they have not been asking the jury for their opinion upon the materiality of a fact; they subject them to an examination in philosophy. It's ridiculous.

There are on one side the assassins and on the other the assassinated. What difference does it make to me whether the fellow who'll split my head be an apache or a lunatic? What does matter to me, is to live. I feel intense compassion for the sick, but I am very anxious that persons suffering with madness be shut in.

All men are ill, said Hippocrates. We all need care; so I see nothing wrong about criminals attracting special attention from the medical corps. There are so many interesting cases among them!

THE INSURRECTION OF THE VERTEBRATES

It is well known how the spiritualists tried to capture Pasteur, because his theories, denying spontaneous generation, seemed to them his consecration of the old dogma of a Creator. Pasteur never professed such ideas; he limited himself to pursuing brilliantly his profession as a scientist. It was not without a feeling of sadness that, pestered by the admiration of a too pious gentry, he wrote to Sainte-Beuve, I believe: "Let us continue our labors, without giving heed to the philosophic or religious deductions that may be drawn from them."

Well, here is that same gentry trying, very maladroitly moreover, to turn to their profit the results of a new scientific theory which is beginning to make a stir in the world,—the law of vital constancy. M. Dastre expounded it the other day at the solemn session of the Institute and demonstrated its supreme importance. If one is eager to keep abreast of intellectual novelties, one should possess some notion of this recent scientific theory; just as one would blush not to possess any notion of Darwin's labors and the theory of evolution, which has now become a part of general culture.

Man is the product of an evolution the origin of which is contemporaneous with the very origins of the world. He has as ancestors not only men, but reckons in his genealogy all manner of animal species. His descent from the monkey through the medium of a semi-human form that is still little known, is today authenticated. The monkey, like all other mammals and also the marsupials (kangaroo, opossum) is a transformation of a reptile; the reptiles, to continue, were born of fishes, who are the first vertebrates to appear, and the fishes in turn descend from the annelides, humble little marine animals. But let us not go any farther back than the fishes, for, in this species we possess a certainty that may be daily demonstrated. At a certain stage of its development the human embryo has the chief characteristics of a fish. All of us were, at a certain moment of our unborn life, fishes; this is as certain as the most easily verified scientific fact. From this piece of evidence, and a hundred others, it has been possible to draw up this aphorism, which unites the evolution of the individual to general evolution: "Every individual, in his embryonic development, goes through the same phases through which the evolution of his species has gone in traversing the ages."

This monumental discovery of the transformation of species is, as we know, due almost entirely to Darwin. It is he who propounded and demonstrated the principle of evolution. But if, in his so abundant books, he explained the how, he did not discover the why. He registered facts, but did not show why these facts should have been absolutely necessary. It is this gap which the theories of M. Quinton now fill, at the same time confirming in a brilliant manner the selfsame principles of Darwinism, evolutionism and transform-ism. Before M. Quinton, one might, strictly speaking, with a semblance of good faith, contest Darwin's conclusions: henceforth, it is impossible: the facts are interconnected; we know their necessary, implacable cause. Thanks to M. Quinton, evolutionism should rather be termed revolutionism.

There are in this theory, two things to consider: life itself, and the environment amid which it develops. Life is a fixed phenomenon. It began in a marine milieu, at the very beginnings of the world, and it tends constantly to preserve, through all the transformations of a terrestrial milieu, the original conditions of its appearance. As a consequence, the most highly developed animals, the superior animals, among which man takes first place, are those which have been able to preserve in the interior of their bodies, in the form of blood, a vital milieu almost identical with the original marine milieu,—the environment in which life was born: in fact, the degree of saltness in our blood represents the saltness of the sea at the moment life made its appearance, and, moreover, our internal temperature represents the mean temperature of the globe at the moment our species was born.

The