of mind. Even persons who have not much acquaintance with science
have at length caught something of its lesson,--that the infinitely
cumulative action of small causes like those which we know is
capable of producing results of the grandest and most thrilling
importance, and that the disposition to recur to the cataclysmic
and miraculous is only a tendency of the childish mind which we are
outgrowing with wider experience.

The whole doctrine of evolution, and in fact the whole advance of
modern science from the days of Copernicus down to the present day,
have consisted in the substitution of processes which are familiar
and the application of those processes, showing how they produce
great results.

When Darwin's "Origin of Species" was first published, when it gave
us that wonderful explanation of the origin of forms of life from
allied forms through the operation of natural selection, it must
have been like a mental illumination to every person who
comprehended it. But after all it left a great many questions
unexplained, as was natural. It accounted for the phenomena of
organic development in general with wonderful success, but it must
have left a great many minds with the feeling: If man has been
produced in this way, if the mere operation of natural selection
has produced the human race, wherein is the human race anyway
essentially different from lower races? Is not man really
dethroned, taken down from that exceptional position in which we
have been accustomed to place him, and might it not be possible, in
the course of the future, for other beings to come upon the earth
as far superior to man as man is superior to the fossilized dragons
of Jurassic antiquity?