earth, and often disastrously, and yet not forever. We are an atrociously independent, and as yet only a half-educated people. De Tocqueville said that individualism is the natural, and must often be a most mischievous, basis of democratic philosophy. To her great credit and to her great temporary mental distress, Massachusetts, in which popular enlightenment is more widely diffused than elsewhere, has probably just now more small philosophers than any other population of equal size on the globe. Emerson wrote of average Massachusetts as she was thirty years ago, "It is a whole population of ladies and gentlemen out in search of a religion." No doubt it is to our credit that we study the newspapers; but it is not to our credit that we do not better maintain the best ones, and that we do not sift newspaper information a little more warily, and that some of us think a man can be competently educated on the most trustworthy part of the daily press. "We must destroy the faith of the people in the penny newspaper," I once heard Carlyle say in his study at Chelsea. I fathomlessly respect able and conscientious newspapers; I revere their majestic mission in history. I used to be told in Europe that Americans are governed by newspapers; and I was accustomed to answer, " No, gentlemen, not by newspapers, but by news - a very different thing." But, whether the shrewdest readers get at the news that is the most strategic in science, in politics, in art, in theology, by a hasty scramble through the midnight scribble of our cheaper dailies, is rather doubt

ful, or, rather, not doubtful at all. The most appropriate prayer, when one takes up the penny newspaper, is an invocation of the spirit of unbelief. But the best-used book of your small philosopher is the newspaper. He is unchurched in art, in science, in theology. He hears great names; he obtains glimpses of great truths; he puts halftruths in the place of systems that will bear the microscope; and when religious science occasionally gets his haughty hearing, it cannot on the Sabbathday go into secular discussion with him, and you cannot hold his attention at first, except by secular discussion. You say that I am using this Lectureship very maladroitly, and that it is not wise to discuss here evolution and materialism. I do not speak to or for ministers or scholars, although they crowd this hall; I am talking to small philosophers.

Lord Bacon said that "truth emerges sooner from error than from confusion;" and, in the spirit of that remark, you will allow me to be analytical, and to number my propositions, in order that I may save time, and yet be distinct in a crowded discussion. Twenty concessions having been mentioned in a previous lecture, it is next to be noticed that it is notorious that evolutionists admit,

21. That life is incompatible with the gaseous state, or the state of fused metals.

22. That our present knowledge justifies the conclusion, that probably two hundred millions, and certainly five hundred millions, of years ago, the earth and the sun were in a fused state.

23. That neither two hundred nor five hundred millions of years are enough to account for the formation of plants and animals from primordial cells on the theory of the Darwinian transmutation.

These, gentlemen, are the outlines of what many men of science regard as the most serious of all objections to the hypothesis of evolution. This is the only difficulty to which Professor Huxley in his NewYork lectures condescended to reply, it is the most prominent of the objections which Häckel endeavors to refute in his recent daring work on "The History of Creation." I now hold in my hand this book, of which Darwin himself says, that its author has much more information than he has on many points, and that, if it had appeared before "The Descent of Man," the latter work would probably never have been written. Professor Häckel teaches at present in the University of Jena, in Germany; and he is one of the most extreme of evolutionists. He denies the freedom of the will, and is a thorough-going defender of the theory of the possibility of spontaneous generation (HÄCKEL, History of Creation, chap. xiii.). He affirms, as Huxley does, that we have no direct evidence that spontaneous generation has ever occurred, and that it is against all the analogy of current nature to suppose that it has occurred. But he knows the exigencies of the radical form of the theory of evolution; and so he assumes, with Strauss, that possibly in a cooling planet a living cell may have been originated by the fortuitous concourse of atoms. A cell once originated, we can account for all life. But

he is painfully aware that the Darwinian transmutation requires almost immeasurable time. "In the same way," he says, "as the distances between the different planetary systems are not calculated by miles, but by Sirius-distances, each of which comprises millions of miles, so the organic history of the earth must not be calculated by thousands of years, but by paleontological or geological periods, each of which comprises many thousands of years, and perhaps millions, or even milliards of thousands of years" (History of Creation, chap. xxiv.). To the same effect speak Lyell and Dana, and even Darwin (LYELL, Geology, vol. i. pp. 234, 235; DANA, Geology, ed. of 1875, p. 591; DARWIN, Origin of Species, p. 286).

Now, Professor Huxley very strangely said, in his lectures in New York, that, if the astronomer and geologist will settle between themselves the question as to the length of geological time, he will "agree with any conclusion."

Not so speaks the candid Darwin; not so the audacious Häckel; not so Lyell; not so Dana; not so any cautious evolutionist; not so even Huxley himself, when he talks before scholars.

"Thousands of millions of years," says Dana (Geology, pp. 59, 591), "have been claimed by some geologists for time since life began. Sir William Thomson has reduced the estimate, on physical grounds, to one hundred millions of years as a maximum." "Any" conclusion! Let us take the best estimate there is, that of one hundred million years;

and Häckel implicitly affirms that this is not enough for the process of the Darwinian transmutation.

What is the evidence, gentlemen, that our earth and the sun were in a molten condition, say, five hundred millions of years ago? We tolerably well know of what materials the sun is composed. We bring down by the spectroscope its talkative rays, and we can tell what metals are in it. We know the nature of these metals on our globe. Heat is the same thing here and there; gravitation, the same here and there; light, the same here and there. The immense argument of analogy makes us sure of our footing just so far as the unity of nature prevails. We can estimate approximately what the heat must have been that would fuse the globe and the sun. Sir William Thomson, whose scientific eminence no man will deny, went into a very labored calculation, not long ago, to determine how many years since it was that the sun was a molten mass, and how many years since it was that the globe was in a fused state; and it is very significant that he came to the same conclusion in both cases. The two conclusions tallied. The sun, he said, must have been in a molten state four hundred millions of years ago at the most; and it probably was in that state two hundred millions of years ago at the least. The same may be said of the earth, which, however, was not cool enough to admit life until about one hundred millions of years ago, as Dana says.

When we look at the reasons why Professor Huxley sneers at this argument, we are the more amazed.