Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/775

Rh difficulties, some inconsistencies, and much to learn, and there may remain beyond much which we shall never know; but I cannot conceive any doctrine professing to bring the phenomena of embryonic development within a general law which is not, like the theory of Darwin, consistent with their fundamental identity, their endless variability, their subjugation to varying external influences and conditions, and with the possibility of the transmission of the vital conditions and properties, with all their variations, from individual to individual, and, in the long lapse of ages, from race to race.

"I regard it, therefore, as no exaggerated representation of the present state of our knowledge to say that the ontogenetic development of the individual in the higher animals repeats in its more general character, and in many of its specific phenomena, the phylogenetic development of the race. If we admit the progressive nature of the changes of development, their similarity in different groups, and their common characters in all animals, nay, even in some respects in both plants and animals, we can scarcely refuse to recognize the possibility of continuous derivation in the history of their origin; and however far we may be, by reason of the imperfection of our knowledge of paleontology, comparative anatomy, and embryology, from realizing the precise nature of the chain of connection by which the actual descent has taken place, still there can be little doubt remaining in the mind of any unprejudiced student of embryology that it is only by the employment of such an hypothesis as that of evolution that further investigation in these several departments will be promoted so as to bring us to a fuller comprehension of the most general law which regulates the adaptation of structure to function in the universe."

print the able and suggestive essay of Prof. Goldwin Smith on "The Decline of Party Government." He opens an interesting question, which, in one shape or another, is bound to force itself more and more upon thinking people. The customary short logic of the case is that we cannot have government without politics, and we cannot have politics without partisanship; this is, therefore, a necessary thing, which must hold the same ascendency in the future that it has held in the past, so that all ideas of doing without it are futile, and all inquiries respecting its decline superfluous. We do not suppose that political parties are to cease, or that partisans have the slightest occasion for anxiety respecting their continuance; but we do not believe that the future is to repeat the past in this matter. The progress and diffusion of science, the formation of scientific habits of thought, and an increasing faculty of observing and reasoning directly upon the facts of life, are going to interfere materially with the ideas and interests of politics. Thus far politics has been a blind and bungling art, necessary indeed, but so crude, loose, and wasteful in its practices, and so much a matter of rule-of thumb, and transient experience, and the manipulation of men, that all idea of far-reaching principles in the political sphere is currently scouted. Yet this is not the region of chaos, and there are laws in political phenomena, deeper than legislative enactments. These are to be gradually worked out into scientific expression, and in proportion as this is done political partisanship must undergo important modification. It may be, as Prof. Smith assumes, that partisanship must decline for lack of serious issues upon which multitudes of men can be kept in proper antagonism. But we calculate upon a growing dissatisfaction with the methods by which the most valid political