to work; and devoutly wishing its consummation,
I have the honour, ladies and gentlemen, to bid you a friendly
farewell.

********************

XV. PROFESSOR VIRCHOW AND EVOLUTION.

THIS world of ours has, on the whole, been an inclement region for the
growth of natural truth; but it may be that the plant is all the
hardier for the bendings and buffetings it has undergone. The
torturing of a shrub, within certain limits, strengthens it Through
the struggles and passions of the brute, man reaches his estate;
through savagery and barbarism his civilisation; and through illusion
and persecution his knowledge of nature, including that of his own
frame. The bias towards natural truth must have been strong to have
withstood and overcome the opposing forces. Feeling appeared in the
world before Knowledge; and thoughts, conceptions, and creeds, founded
on emotion, had, before the dawn of science, taken root in man. Such
thoughts, conceptions, and creeds must have met a deep and general
want; otherwise their growth could not have been so luxuriant, nor
their abiding power so strong. This general need--this hunger for the
ideal and wonderful--led eventually to the differentiation of a caste,
whose vocation it was to cultivate the mystery of life and its
surroundings, and to give shape, name, and habitation to the emotions
which that mystery aroused. Even the savage lived, not by bread
alone, but in a mental world peopled with forms answering to his
capacities and needs. As time advanced--in other words, as the savage
opened out into civilised man--these forms were purified and ennobled
until they finally emerged in the mythology and art of Greece:

Where still the magic robe of Poesy
Wound itself lovingly around the Truth.

[Footnote:

Da der Dichtung zauberische Huelle
Sich noch lieblich um die Wahrheit wand.'--Schiller.]

As poets, the priesthood would have been justified, their deities,
celestial and otherwise, with all their retinue and appliances, being
more or less legitimate symbols and personifications of the aspects of
nature and the phases of the human soul. The priests, however, or
those among them who were mechanics, and not poets, claimed objective
validity for their conceptions, and tried to base upon external
evidence that which sprang from the innermost need and nature of man.
It is against this objective rendering of the emotions--this thrusting
into the region of fact a