pretation of
Evolution fails to account for that which is most characteristic in the
process, the steady progress it reveals. Were Evolution an aimless,
fruitless motion, rising and falling alternately, or moving round and
round in an endless circle, the reference of these motions to the blind
forces of matter might have, perhaps, a certain plausibility. But the
movements of the evolution process are of quite a different character.
They are not chaotic; no barren, useless circlings back to the same
point, again and again; but they are progressive; and if often they seem
to return to their point of departure, we see, on close examination,
that the return is always on a higher plane. The motion is a spiral one,
ever advancing to loftier and loftier ranges. Now this progressive
motion is something that no accidental play of the atoms will account
for. For chance builds no such rational structures. Chance writes no
such intelligent dramas, with orderly beginning, crescendo, and climax.
Or if some day, chance builds a structure with some show of order in it,
to-morrow it pulls it down. It does not move steadily forward with
permanent constructiveness.

The further Science penetrates into the secrets of the universe the more
regular seems the march of thought presented there; the more harmonious
the various parts; the more rational the grand system that is
discovered. "How the one force of the universe should have pursued the
pathway of Evolution through the lapse of millions of ages, leaving
traces so legible by intelligence to-day, unless from beginning to end
the whole process had been dominated by intelligence," this is
something, as Francis Abbot well says, that passes the limits of
conjecture. The all-luminous intelligibility of the universe is the
all-sufficient proof of the intelligence of the cause that produced it.
In the annals of science there is nothing more curious than the
prophetic power which those savans have gained who have grasped this
secret of nature--the rationality of the universe. It was by this
confidence in finding in the hitherto unexplored domains of nature what
reason demanded, that Goethe, from the analogies of the mammalian
skeleton, discovered the intermaxillary bone in man; and Sir William
Hamilton, from the mathematical consequences of the undulation of light,
led the way to the discovery of conical refraction. A similar story is
told of Prof. Agassiz and Prof. Pierce, the one the great zooe