e _savant_, for example, procured an animal
evidently of the cat tribe, and another species like a polecat. He knew
as a fact that the feline teeth had a certain structure, and that the
dental formula of the viverrine animals is different. Here, then, he
could distinguish and perhaps name the species; but what more was to be
done? All natural history as a study seemed to end in classifying and
giving long names to plants and animals. The Evolution theory at once
gave it a new object. Why is the dental formula of the _viverrinae_
different? What purpose has the long spur in the flower of _Angraecum_,
or the marvellous bucket of _Coryanthes_, the flytrap of _Dionaea_, the
pitcher of _Nepenthes_? What is the cause, what is the purpose, what is
the plan in the scheme of nature, of these structures? Under the
stimulus of such questions naturalists woke up to new views of
classification, to new experiments, inquiries, and to research for facts
and the explanation of facts, in all quarters of the globe. No wonder
that science rose, under such an impulse, as a butterfly from its
chrysalis. But some will not be satisfied with any scheme the parts of
which are separated, or which admits of anything unknown or
unexplainable. They want to unite all into one grand and simple whole,
which glorifies their own intelligence, and does not force them to
humble patience and waiting for more light. And then the fatal enmity of
the human heart--which is a plain fact, an undeniable tendency--delights
to get rid of the idea of God's Sovereignty, the humbling sense that
everything is at His absolute disposal, and nothing could be but as He
wills it. It seems so satisfactory to eliminate all external mysterious
power, to make the whole "_totus teres atque rotundus_"--having started
the great machine of being _somehow_ to see it all expand and unroll
of itself and advance to the end.

Imagination leaps the chasms, minimizes the difficulties, passes from
the possible to the certain, from the "may have been" to the "must have
been" and to "it was so," and, fascinated with the _completeness_ of its
scheme, commences to denounce and revile as ignorant and unscientific
all that would, calmly appeal to evidence, and confess ignorance, or at
least a suspended judgment, in any stage where the evidence is negative
or incomplete.

It has been well observed that "men are so constituted that completeness
gives a special kind of satisfaction of its own, and