prove that it may not become more rapid and less fruitful in sorrow as
humanity goes on.(196)

(196) As to the good effects of migration, see Waitz, Introduction to
Anthropology, London, 1863, p. 345.

While, then, it is not denied that many instances of retrogression can
be found, the consenting voice of unbiased investigators in all lands
has declared more and more that the beginnings of our race must have
been low and brutal, and that the tendency has been upward. To combat
this conclusion by examples of decline and deterioration here and
there has become impossible: as well try to prove that, because in the
Mississippi there are eddies in which the currents flow northward, there
is no main stream flowing southward; or that, because trees decay and
fall, there is no law of upward growth from germ to trunk, branches,
foliage, and fruit.

A very striking evidence that the theological theory had become
untenable was seen when its main supporter in the scientific field,
Von Martius, in the full ripeness of his powers, publicly declared his
conversion to the scientific view.

Yet, while the tendency of enlightened human thought in recent times is
unmistakable, the struggle against the older view is not yet ended. The
bitterness of the Abbe Hamard in France has been carried to similar
and even greater extremes among sundry Protestant bodies in Europe and
America. The simple truth of history mates it a necessity, unpleasant
though it be, to chronicle two typical examples in the United States.

In the year 1875 a leader in American industrial enterprise endowed at
the capital of a Southern State a university which bore his name. It was
given into the hands of one of the religious sects most powerful in that
region, and a bishop of that sect became its president. To its chair
of Geology was called Alexander Winchell, a scholar who had already
won eminence as a teacher and writer in that field, a professor greatly
beloved and respected in the two universities with which he had been
connected, and a member of the sect which the institution of learning
above referred to represented.

But his relations to this Southern institution were destined to be
brief. That his lectures at the Vanderbilt University were learned,
attractive, and stimulating, even his enemies were forced to admit; but
he was soon found to believe that there had been men earlier than the
period as signed to Adam, and even that all the human rac