SIR: The editorial in the December Popular Science Monthly on the relations of Emerson to evolution must have surprised many of the students of Emerson. A little over two years ago Moncure D. Conway pointed out (Open Court, 1896) that soon after his resignation from the pulpit of the Unitarian Church with which he was last connected, Emerson taught zoölogy, botany, paleontology, and geology, and that he was a pronounced evolutionist who used in his lectures the argument in favor of evolution drawn from the practical identity of the extremities of the vertebrates. That Emerson was an evolutionist of the Goethean type is clear from most of his essays. In an essay appearing before the Origin of Species, he wrote as follows: "The electric word pronounced by John Hunter a hundred years ago, _arrested and progressive development_, indicating the way upward from the invisible protoplasm to the highest organisms, gave the poetic key to Natural Science, of which the theories of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, of Oken, of Goethe, of Agassiz and Owen and Darwin in zoölogy and botany are the fruits--a hint whose power is not exhausted, showing unity and perfect order in physics. "The hardest chemist, the severest analyzer, scornful of all but the driest fact, is forced to keep the poetic curve of Nature, and his results are like a myth of Theocritus. All multiplicity rushes to be resolved into unity. Anatomy, osteology, exhibit arrested or progressive ascent in each kind; the lower pointing to the higher forms, the higher to the highest, from the fluid in an elastic sac, from radiate, mollusk, articulate, vertebrate, up to man; as if the whole animal world were only a Hunterian museum to exhibit the genesis of mankind." The Darwin to whom reference is made in this essay is not Charles, but his grandfather, one of the poets of evolution, Erasmus. The essay also shows the belief in evolution held by both Owen and Louis Agassiz before theological timidity made them unprogressive. The names quoted illustrate further the factors which influenced Emerson's thought in regard to evolution. Saint-Hilaire gave the _coup de grâce_ to Cuvier's fight against evolution. Oken is one of the great pioneers of evolution. Goethe shares with Empedocles, Lucretius, and Erasmus Darwin the great honor of being a poet of evolution. Of the four, Goethe was by all odds the greatest. To him, the doctrine of evolution was of more importance than the downfall of a despot. The eve of the Revolution of 1830 found him watching over the dispute between Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire with an interest that obscured every other.