Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE MAN AND THE ANIMAL Lower than God who knows all and can all, Higher than beasts which know and can so far As each beast's limit, perfect to an end, Nor conscious that they know, nor craving more; While man knows partly but conceives beside, Creeps ever on from fancies to the fact, And in this striving, this converting air Into a solid he may grasp and use, Finds progress, man's distinctive mark alone. Not God's, and not the beasts': God is, they are, Man partly is and wholly hopes to be. —Robert Browning, A Death in the Desert. When I speak of transition I do not in the least mean to say that one species turned into a second to develop thereafter into a third. What I mean is that the characters of the second are intermediate between those of the two others. It is as if I were to say that such and such a cathedral, Canterbury, for example, is a transition between York Minster and Westminster Abbey. No one would imagine, on hearing the word transition, that a transmutation of these buildings actually took place from one into another.—Thomas Henry Huxley Life and Letters, ii, 428. In the scientific sense evolution is neither a controlling law nor a producing cause, but simply a description of a phenomenal order, a statement of what, granting the theory, an observer might have seen, if he had been able to inspect the cosmic movement from its simplest stages until now. It is a statement of method and is silent about causation. . . . The causality of the series lies beyond it; and the relations of the members are logical and teleological, not dynamic. In that case much evolution argument vanishes of itself. Survivals, reversions, atavisms, and that sort of thing become only figures of speech, which are never to be literally taken. In a pheno...