tudies the difference between the stamens of the same
plant. He counted nine thousand seeds, one by one, from artificially
fertilized pods. Plants from two pollens, he says, grow at different
rates. Any difference in the position of the pistil, or in the size
and color of the stamens, in individuals of the same species grown
together, was of keen interest to him.

The best thing about Darwinism is Darwin--his candor, his patience,
his simplicity, his devotion to truth, and his power of observation.
This is about what Professor T. H. Morgan meant when he said: "It is
the spirit of Darwinism, not its formulae, that we proclaim as our best
heritage." He gave us a new point of view of the drama of creation; he
gave us ideas that are applicable to the whole domain of human
activities. It is true, he was not a pioneer in this field: he did not
blaze the first trail through this wilderness of biological facts and
records; rather was he like a master-engineer who surveys and
establishes the great highway. All the world now travels along the
course he established and perfected. He made the long road of
evolution easy, and he placed upon permanent foundations the doctrine
of the animal origin of man. He taught the world to think in terms of
evolution, and he pointed the way to a rational explanation of the
diversity of living forms.

V

WHAT MAKES A POEM?

Pope said that a middling poet was no poet at all. Middling things in
art or in any field of human endeavor do not arouse our enthusiasm,
and it is enthusiasm that fans the fires of life. There are all
degrees of excellence, but in poetry one is always looking for the
best. Pope himself holds a place in English literature which he could
not hold had he been only a middling poet. He is not a poet of the
highest order certainly, but a poet of the third or fourth order--the
poet of the reason, the understanding, but not of the creative
imagination. It is wit and not soul that keeps Pope alive.

Nearly every age and land has plenty of middling poets. Probably there
were never more of them in the land than there are to-day. Scores of
volumes of middling verse are issued from the press every week. The
magazines all have middling verse; only at rare intervals do they have
something more. The May "Atlantic," for instance, had a poem by a (to
me) comparatively new writer, Olive Tilford Dargan, that one would
hardly stigmatize as middling poetry. Let the reader judge for
h