Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/863

Rh "flower in the crannied wall." But are we to abandon or disparage what we know about the chemical composition of the rose because there is that in its synthesis which eludes us? Or are we to refuse our admiration to the flower because its original elements promised no such revelation of beauty?

and the part of wisdom is to make the best of it. If there are those who think they discern a flaw in the title of the moral law, and on that account propose to trample it under their feet, all we can do is to keep our eye on such and see that the moral law is duly re-enforced by material sanctions. A writer of more than literary authority has described "the law" as "a schoolmaster" (literally, pedagogue or child-conductor) to bring us to the true source of instruction; and we may rightly infer that the external precepts which have more or less governed mankind in the past, by whatever authority promulgated, have had for their function to bring men to a recognition of the intrinsic moral quality of actions, and to incline them to choose good in preference to evil. The course of human evolution has brought us a developed moral sense; and the important question for us now is not whether that supreme faculty was foreshadowed in the pre-organic world, or whether it can be read into the atomic philosophy; but whether it is a living fact today, whether it is useful for guidance and whether obedience to it is an essential condition of happiness. The search for title-deeds is very well within limits; but there was a time when title-deeds were not, simply because the conditions did not call for them. The moral law is in possession, and will remain in possession, because it has become part of the constitution of human nature.

an excellent article on the late Prof. Huxley, contributed by the eminent Professor of Physiology at the University of Cambridge to Nature, and reprinted in this number of the we read that the "note" of the "new morphology," of which Huxley made himself so earnest and successful an apostle, was "not to speculate on guiding forces and on the realization of ideals, but to determine the laws of growth by the careful investigation, as of so many special problems, of what parts of different animals, as shown, among other ways, by the mode of their development, were really the same or alike." The result of the prosecution of research along this line, Prof. Foster says, has been the acquisition since the year 1850 of "a body of science touching animal forms both recent and extinct of which we may well be proud," and that altogether apart from the special discoveries which may be traced directly or indirectly to the influence of the Darwinian theory of natural selection.

We have thought it worth while to cite this dictum of the Cambridge professor as bearing somewhat closely on a recent discussion in these columns. A contributor who was dissatisfied with certain references we had made to the doctrine of design, put forward his own opinion to the effect that the time had now come for making design the Why?—the guiding principle—of research. Such is manifestly not Prof. Foster's opinion, or else, while commending Huxley for throwing in his lot with the "new morphology," he would certainly have hinted that there was a yet newer morphology, destined to