Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/846

824, but a creator—κτιστης ού τεχνίτης. In the beginning he created all things and then impressed on them the power of development, of evolving into the innumerable species we now behold. All things existed in idea before they existed in fact, and the design and purpose which are revealed in animate and inanimate Nature are the witnesses of the foresight and providence of creative wisdom. Paley and the older school of teleologists pointed to a watch as a beautiful and convincing evidence of design. To the modern teleologist, studying the universe in the light of evolution, it is not simply a watch that presents itself as a witness of purpose running through all things created, from atom to star, but it is a watch which is competent to produce other and better watches. God makes things, it is true, but he makes them by making them make themselves. Similarly, we read purpose in Nature not only by limiting our view to the present and to simple individuals, but also, and more particularly, by studying the species and the class to which individuals belong, in the light of their past history or in the changes they may undergo in the future by reason of varied conditions or continued development. In the words of Mr. Aubrey L. Moore: "If ontogeny, the history of the individual, gives us no answer, we fall back on phylogeny, the history of the race. Organs, which on the old theory of special creations were useless and meaningless, are now seen to have their explanation in the past or in the future, according as they are rudimentary or nascent. There is nothing useless, nothing meaningless in Nature, nothing due to caprice or chance, nothing irrational or without a cause, nothing outside the reign of law. This belief in the universality of the reign of law is the scientific analogue of the Christian's belief in Providence."

principal feature in the orography of South America, from Cape Horn northward, says Mr. Otto Nordenskjold, in describing his journey in southwestern Patagonia, is the contrast between a high Pacific mountain chain and a wide Atlantic table-land. This circumstance causes different parts of the country to wear aspects that are very dissimilar, but nowhere does the contrast appear so strongly as in Tierra del Fuego, where the summits of the Cordilleras, covered with perpetual snow, and very often also by clouds, rains, and fog, can all be seen from the dry Atlantic coast. Not quite so rapid, but still very wonderful, is the transition in Patagonia; and the region lying between 50° and 52° south latitude is in addition more interesting than any part of Tierra del Fuego, owing to the peculiar character given to parts of it by the presence of masses of basaltic rocks and lava cones in the east, and of great ice fields in the western valleys.