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278 eventually emerges tired and unenlightened to ardently seek refreshment of another nature. We unhesitatingly say that this official obscurantism is no longer possible, and that it is owing to chiefs like Sir William Flower that it is dying now and will be incapable of resuscitation in the future. A zoological museum is capable of a vast aesthetic leavening of the masses; a love of nature is universal and precedes art. The degradation of museums to the present zoological ignorance of the masses is not desired, but a levelling up of the latter is the thing needful, when natural history may be seen to be a thing of national importance, and worthy of real national support. At present, as Sir William observes, "the largest museum yet erected, with all its internal fittings, has not cost so much as a single fullyequipped line-of-battle ship, which in a few years may be either at the bottom of the sea, or so obsolete in construction as to be worth no more than the materials of which it is made."

Pregnant with meaning, not only from its matter, but also by its place of delivery, is the paper read before the Church Congress in 1883, on "the sequence of events which have taken place in the universe, to which the term 'evolution' is now commonly applied." Great as was the import of this communication to such an audience fifteen years ago, it is more than probable that a similar Congress at the present day would appreciate the subject as less disturbing and more familiar. Than Sir William Flower no better enunciator could have been found of the "doctrine of continuity" to a body of men whose studies lay outside a philosophical conception which yet made its presence felt in all regions of thought. It required in such an assembly the cautious handling of an expert, so that the teaching of the naturalist should neither appear as an inerrant dogma, nor, as is sometimes the case, a stream of biological assumptions or suggestions. In fact, among some zoologists, and other speculative writers of the day, an opinion by the author of this book may well be considered, "that natural selection, or survival of the fittest, has, among other agencies, played a most important part in the production of the present condition of the organic world, and that it is a universally acting and beneficent force continually tending towards the perfection of the individual, of the race, and of the whole living world." We have ventured to italicise a few words.