Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/701

Rh periods of ascendency and decline. But organic evolution ever continues. Progress in organization is the constant result. It is always, on the whole, the less organized that gives way to the more organized. If the rich and exuberant cryptogamic vegetation of the Carboniferous epoch has dwindled away into the insignificant cryptogamic vegetation of our time, it has been succeeded by a phænogamic vegetation of far higher organization and nobler qualities. If the great saurian dynasty that ruled the Cretaceous age has surrendered its sceptre and disappeared from the stage of terrestrial life, a far higher mammalian dynasty, at whose head man now stands, has taken up that sceptre and is moving on to still loftier heights of organic development.

We have thus arrived at the highest point from which the phenomena of organic evolution can be surveyed. What do we see? We see that, in proportion as our point of view rises, the relative importance of the phenomena of dissolution to those of evolution diminishes. We see that the dissolution of the individual aggregate affects but little the evolution of the race-aggregate, and not at all that of the complete life-aggregate of the globe. We see that, amid all the evanescent forms that surround us, the evolution of life is constant; that of organic being as such there is no dissolution. We thus find the parallelism between cosmic and organic evolution, which at the outset seemed so paradoxical, and afterward so imperfect, to be at last complete. In the one as in the other, the only phenomena which we know to be universal are those of evolution. In the one as in the other, the opposite class of phenomena are wholly subordinate, special, and local. In the one as in the other, the forces of attraction and repulsion, of integration and disintegration, are in perpetual conflict. In the one as in the other, the organization of matter is the result. Just as the doctrine of the ultimate dissolution of the bodies of space rests on a priori deductions alone, unsupported by empirical observation, so must the final disorganization of the life of our globe be inferred from cosmological principles, which transcend the present limits of astronomy and physics. So far as we are capable of penetrating the mysteries of space or of life, we find that evolution is the law of the universe; while the forces which oppose that law, though powerful and ever active, are secondary and subordinate, and only seem to reverse it by the destruction of transient forms. In the genesis of world-systems this counter-evolutionary force consists in the inherent expansive power of diffused matter, or, what amounts to the same thing, in the resistance which such matter offers to the forces of condensation. In the phenomena of life this resistance comes chiefly from the sun, whose thermal radiations tend to dissipate the elements of the globe.

We are thus brought into full view of the deepest truth that underlies the redistribution of matter—the profound antithesis