Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/825

Rh a practical application of these sciences was capable of showing an immediate material return.

Agassiz, in his appeal to the State for appropriations for the great museum at Cambridge, insisted that there were higher dividends than those of money to be looked for in endowments for zoölogical museums, and these were intellectual dividends. "While the force of this appeal will always remain true, the transcendent importance of the naturalist's studies from the standpoint of Darwin is widely recognized. Man now becomes an object of rigid scientific scrutiny from the new position which has shed such a flood of light upon the animals below him. His habits, behavior, the physical influences of his environment and their effects upon him, transmission of peculiarities through the laws of heredity—all these factors are directly implicated in the burning questions and problems which agitate him to-day. Questions of labor, temperance, prison reform, distribution of charities, religious agitations, are questions immediately concerning the mammal man, and are now to be seriously studied from the solid standpoint of observation and experiment and not from the emotional and often incongruous attitude of the Church. To a naturalist it may seem well-nigh profitless to discuss the question of evolution since the battle has been won, and if there be any discussion it is as to the relative merits and force of the various factors involved. The public, however, are greatly interested in the matter, as may be seen by a renewal of the fight in the English reviews, and the agitation is still kept up by well-meaning though ignorant advisers, who insist that Science has not yet accepted the doctrine; and great Church organizations meet to condemn and expel their teachers of science from certain schools of learning because their teachings are imbued with the heresy.

Dr. Asa Gray, in his discriminating biographical memoir of Darwin, says, in regard to the "Doctrine of Descent": "It is an advance from which it is evidently impossible to recede. As has been said of the theory of the Conservation of Energy, so of this: 'The proof of this great generalization, like that of all other generalizations, lies mainly in the fact that the evidence in its favor is continually augmenting, while that against it is continually diminishing, as the progress of science reveals to us more and more the working of the universe.'" Let us examine, then, the evidences, trivial as well as important, that have been recorded by American zoölogists within the past ten years in support of the derivative theory.

Without further apology for the very imperfect character of this survey, let me at once begin by calling attention first to the testimony regarding the variation in habits and evidences of reasoning power in animals. The establishment of individual variation in mental powers, change in habits, etc., lies at the foundation of Darwinism as furnishing material for selective action. There is no