Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/478

462 When the Japanese embassadorsambassadors [sic] visited the United States, it was remarked that the manners of the most refined men among them were essentially European or American, if we choose so to state it; not that they were in the smallest particular borrowed or assumed, but because there is a logic in the culture of the human being, that brings about the same results all the world over, so far as manners are concerned. The style of Marcus Antoninus has this cosmopolitan air. He seems to have been the really complete ideal of a cultivated man; and his ways of thinking, his methods of expression, his social views, his manners, in fact, are correspondingly broad.

He would be at home in any century; but in none so completely, it seems to me, as in the nineteenth. You long to hear of his introduction to Darwin and Spencer, and feel that the conversation would grow interesting at once. The deeply-rooted doctrine of special creation is, we know, now losing force day by day, for all who have the opportunity to become acquainted with the current results of scientific investigation, even in a superficial, popular way. The invention of a matured animal is seen to be inconceivable, because all the facts that appertain to the idea of maturity are so definitely associated with the recognition of advancing age, that the conceptions are found to be inseparable. One of the scientific puzzles has therefore been to account in an intelligent manner for the different phases of life that occur from age to age; to suggest, as it were, some positive vehicle whose duty it has been to carry along the sequence of influences from generation to generation. Draper makes a suggestion in this direction, and points out that the air we breathe is the grand receptacle from which all living things come, and to which they all return. It is, he says, the cradle of vegetable, the coffin of animal life: made up of atoms that have once lived, and that have run through innumerable cycles of change, its particles await their turn for further reorganization. A corresponding thought also appears to have passed through the mind of Antoninus; not, of course, precisely in the same form, but there is an intelligible hint of the idea in the following sentence: "If souls continue to exist, how does the air contain them from eternity?"

Every era has what may be called its fashionable real problem for discussion. Sometimes it is ethical; at others, mechanical; or it may be artistic.

The recognition of a process of development in all things—or, as it is well termed, "evolution"—is the essential natural law which seems just now to be the important centre of scientific interest; and it may almost be said to be an outgrowth of the present decade. Yet in our author we see the same kind of yeast fermenting, and becoming an incisive statement in appropriate words. "Observe constantly that all things take place by change. Accustom yourself to consider that the nature of the universe loves nothing so much as to change