Page:The Harveian oration ; delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, June 26th, 1879 (IA b24976465).pdf/26

 the earth, of which he forms a part, is the doctrine of evolution.


 * "The softest dimple in a baby's smile
 * Springs from the whole of past eternity,
 * Tasked all the sum of things to bring it there."

To those who refuse to look intelligently around them everything is stationary, things are now as they ever were, and they choose to think that this view is necessary to a religious frame of mind; but the idea of development and progress is far grander and more sublime; it is felt by the thoughtful to be true and stamped upon our very nature. Coleridge the Christian, the philosopher, and poet, possessing one of the profoundest minds that England has ever seen, with a wide grasp of nature in all her forms, had a glimpse of what now is erected into a science of evolution and morphology. He says, "Every rank of creatures as it ascends in the scale of creation leaves death behind it or under it. The metal at its height of being seems a mute prophecy of the coming vegetation, into a mimic resemblance of which it crystallises. The blossom and flower, the acme of vegetable life, divides into corresponding organs