Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/381

 can pick up about our fields or our houses. The old view of creation, which represented it as single and instantaneous, made each creature or each organ seem like a mere piece of molded mechanism, with no history, no puzzle, and no recognizable relation to its like elsewhere. But the new view, which represents creation as continuous, progressive, and regular, teaches lis to see in every species or every structure a result of previous causes, an adaptation to preexisting needs. Thus we are enabled to find in a flower, a fruit, or a feather, innumerable clews which lead us back to its ultimate origin, and give delightful exercise to our intelligence in tracing out the probable steps by which this complex whole has been produced.

I often figure to myself the difference between the two ways of regarding natural objects, by means of the initial letters in an ordinary volume, and the initial letters which Mr. Linley Sambourne draws for us so cleverly in "Punch." Look at the big O of a newspaper leader—it is just a mass of metal, poured into a circular or oval type. But look at the big O which the ingenious artist tricks out for us with social allusions or political innuendoes, and what a world of amusement you will find if you take the trouble to spell out all its quaint devices! See how every curl has some playful hit at a noble lord or an honorable member; how every detail smiles with gentle satire at some passing event or some universal topic. Not a touch but has a meaning for those who will seek it; not a careless little smudge in the corner but brims over with deep purpose and infinite wealth of covert mirth. So it is, I think, with flowers, fruits, or feathers, when once we have learned to look for their hidden hints. This little twist points back to some strange fact in the past history of the species; that unobtrusive spur or knob is the clew to whole volumes of botanical or zoological lore. Not a detail but tells of the origin and development of the whole; not a tuft, a spot, or a streak but teems with information for the seeker who has found out the method of seeking aright.

Again, to vary our simile, let us visit some ancient British earthwork or Roman camp. If we go as mere rustics, we see in it all nothing more than a broken ridge of earth on the summit of a rolling down. We are not even sure whether it is really the handiwork of man, or some queer natural formation like the Devil's Dike, the Giant's Causeway, and the parallel roads of Glen Roy. But if we go under the guidance of some skilled archaeologist, what a flood of light he is able to throw over its history and its meaning! This row of strongholds, he tells us, formed the frontier line, say between the Welsh of Dorset and the Welsh of Devon. Here the Durotriges and Damnonii, the men of the water-vale and the men of the hills, faced one another from their opposite heights. Sweep round your eye in a semicircle along this series of points, overhanging the valley of the Axe, and you will find every higher summit crowned with a "castle," a rude earthwork raised by the men whom our fathers drove out of the land. That