ave preceded them
in past times. Here we shall find, not a material connection by which
blind laws of matter have evolved the whole creation out of a single
germ, but the clue to that intellectual conception which spans the whole
series of the geological ages and is perfectly consistent in all its
parts. In this sense the present will indeed explain the past, and the
young naturalist is happy who enters upon his life of investigation now,
when the problems that were dark to all his predecessors have received
new light from the sciences of Palaeontology and Embryology.

* * * * *

BLIND TOM.

Only a germ in a withered flower,
That the rain will bring out--sometime.

Sometime in the year 1850, a tobacco-planter in Southern Georgia
(Perry H. Oliver by name) bought a likely negro woman with some other
field-hands. She was stout, tough-muscled, willing, promised to be a
remunerative servant; her baby, however, a boy a few months old, was
only thrown in as a makeweight to the bargain, or rather because Mr.
Oliver would not consent to separate mother and child. Charity only
could have induced him to take the picaninny, in fact, for he was but
a lump of black flesh, born blind, and with the vacant grin of idiocy,
they thought, already stamped on his face. The two slaves were
purchased, I believe, from a trader: it has been impossible, therefore,
for me to ascertain where Tom was born, or when. Georgia field-hands
are not accurate as Jews in preserving their genealogy; _they_ do
not anticipate a Messiah. A white man, you know, has that vague hope
unconsciously latent in him, that he is, or shall give birth to, the
great man of his race, a helper, a provider for the world's hunger: so
he grows jealous with his blood; the dead grandfather may have presaged
the possible son; besides, it is a debt he owes to this coming Saul to
tell him whence he came. There are some classes, free and slave, out of
whom society has crushed this hope: they have no clan, no family-names
among them, therefore. This idiot-boy, chosen by God to be anointed with
the holy chrism, is only "Tom,"--"Blind Tom," they call him in all the
Southern States, with a kind cadence always, being proud and fond
of him; and yet--nothing but Tom? That is pitiful. Just a
mushroom-growth,--unkinned, unexpected, not hoped for, for generations,
owning no name to purify and honor and give away when he is dead. His
mother, at work to-