in this matter, which we in our ignorance, and
notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto
covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of every form and
quality of life."

Yet, after all this marvelous endowment of matter with all potency, we
have not got quite back to the beginning. For still the questions arise,
Where did this almighty matter come from? Who endowed it with these
wonderful potencies? And how does it happen to work so well, in such
orderly and regular evolution of star dust, suns, planets, pollywogs,
monkeys, men and maggots, in eternal cycles, ever advancing higher and
doing better and better for the race, though poorly enough, it appears,
for the miserable individuals? Here Buchner, Vogt, Spencer and other
materialists come in and perfect that which was lacking; showing how the
star dust made itself, and how the paving stones made themselves, and
are under no obligations to any Creator but themselves. Matter and force
are all they need, and endless time in which to work, and they will
account for the universe without any Creator at all. Everything and
every person must be just as it is, according to the regular operation
of the laws of Nature.

As Buchner, Vogt and Spencer have given the system a head, Lubbock,
Evans and others have supplied it with a tail, and demonstrated how
society, and morals, and religion have been excogitated by the apes out
of their meditations in the forests. It is a fearful and wonderful
account they give us of the origin of marriage from the battles of the
baboons, of the rights of property established by terrible fights for
groves of good chestnuts, of the beginnings of morals from the instincts
of brutes, and of the dawnings of religion, or rather of superstition,
from the dreams of these animals; the result of the whole being that
civilization, and society, and law, and order, and religion, are all
simply the evolution of the instincts of the brutes, and that there is
no necessity for invoking any supernatural interference to produce them.
The termination of the whole, as far as you and I are concerned, is that
"We shall fade away as the faint cloud melts into the blue ether," into
the eternal sleep of death.

It thus appears that there is an orderly succession and attempted
adjustment of one part of the doctrine of evolution to another, and that
all the various workers are cooperating toward one grand result. It is
true they differ wi