follow from it deserve our attention. Since Darwin's solution,
Natural Selection, was discarded, twenty or thirty years ago, many other
solutions have been propounded, but none has received the assent of even
a respectable group of scientists, let alone by all. These solutions,
--such as the theories of de Vries and Mendel, are frankly no more than
guesses based on certain observation in plant life and insect life and
their originators by no means assert that they have found a law by which
the universe can be accounted for. But if there is no universal law,
there is only _chance_. Hence it is clear that what we are asked to
believe is that ancient Greek speculation was after all not far from the
truth, that through a fortuitous (accidental) concourse of atoms the
world came into being, and that by chance combinations of elements the
great variety of living things arose.

Such is the condition of evolutionistic thought to-day. That there is no
_direct_ evidence for organic evolution is generally admitted. That
geology cannot be quoted for it is also quite generally conceded, since
the sudden rise of perfect (not half-developed) insects, of perfect
fish, of perfect mammals, is clear even to the man who merely turns the
leaves of Geikie's, Le Conte's, and Dana's text books, or visits Field's
Museum. Yet _some-how_ things must have gotten to be what they are by
development from earlier forms,--this about sums up what is really
contained in the concept of evolution as it appears in most recent
scientific literature, so far as scientists at all touch upon the
subject. However, they by no means urge the evolutionary principle as
they used to do. Bacteriologists especially, so I am informed by a
chemist of international repute, Dr. P. A. Kober, of New York, as a
class are inclined to give up the theory as a "bad guess." Why, they
find in fossil fish diseased portions which bear unmistakable traces of
the action of bacteria which live to-day, in other words, which in
"countless millions of years" have not progressed enough to show any
change recognizable under the most powerful miscroscope! [tr. note: sic]
Anthropologists shake their head when they are told by evolutionists
that the animal which shows clearest "resemblance" in a structural way,
to certain points in human anatomy, is a small fossil ape, about the
size of a house cat, with a skull one inch in diameter! There remains no
proof, direct or indirect, of any _principle_