dug-out canoe culminates in the iron-clad and the 'Great Eastern'; his
boomerang and slingstone in the Woolwich infant; his boiling pipkin and
his wheeled car in the locomotive engine; his picture-message in the
telephone and the Atlantic cable. Here, where the course of evolution
has really been most marvellous, its steps have been all more distinctly
historical; so that nobody now doubts the true descent of Italian,
French, and Spanish from provincial Latin, or the successive growth of
the trireme, the 'Great Harry,' the 'Victory,' and the 'Minotaur' from
the coracles or praus of prehistoric antiquity.

The grand conception of the uniform origin and development of all
things, earthly or sidereal, thus summed up for us in the one word
evolution, belongs by right neither to Charles Darwin nor to any other
single thinker. It is the joint product of innumerable workers, all
working up, though some of them unconsciously, towards a grand final
unified philosophy of the cosmos. In astronomy, Kant, Laplace, and the
Herschels; in geology, Hutton, Lyell, and the Geikies; in biology,
Buffon, Lamarck, the Darwins, Huxley, and Spencer; in psychology,
Spencer, Romanes, Sully, and Ribot; in sociology, Spencer, Tylor,
Lubbock, and De Mortillet--these have been the chief evolutionary
teachers and discoverers. But the use of the word evolution itself, and
the establishment of the general evolutionary theory as a system of
philosophy applicable to the entire universe, we owe to one man
alone--Herbert Spencer. Many other minds--from Galileo and Copernicus,
from Kepler and Newton, from Linnaeus and Tournefort, from D'Alembert and
Diderot, nay, even, in a sense, from Aristotle and Lucretius--had been
piling together the vast collection of raw material from which that
great and stately superstructure was to be finally edified. But the
architect who placed each block in its proper niche, who planned and
designed the whole elevation, who planted the building firmly on the
rock and poised the coping-stone on the topmost pinnacle, was the author
of the 'System of Synthetic Philosophy,' and none other. It is a strange
proof of how little people know about their own ideas, that among the
thousands who talk glibly every day of evolution, not ten per cent. are
probably aware that both word and conception are alike due to the
commanding intelligence and vast generalising power of Herbert Spencer.

STRICTLY INCOG.

Among the reefs of rock