The desire which runs through creation is one desire. Rudimentary at first and hardly conscious of itself, throwing out a tentacle here, a foot there, developing an eye, a claw, a nostril, a wing, it seeks in innumerable shapes and with ever partial success to realise the image it has dimly conceived. The animal kingdom is the gymnasium, the school, the antechamber, of humanity; to walk through a zoological garden is to see the inchoate types of man, perched on branches, or browsing grass, or boring holes in the ground; it is to witness a grand rehearsal of some stupendous part, whose character we do not even yet fully see or understand. From such half-conscious beginnings the desire grows, its aim becomes clearer, till in the higher animals--the horse, the dog, the elephant, the bird, and many others--it becomes a marked and unmistakable force drawing them close to man, uniting them to him in a kind of acknowledged kinship, and as obviously at work modifying their structure as can be. Finally in man himself it becomes an absorbing power; love becomes a conscious worship of the divine form; generation itself is the means whereby, in time, the supreme object of desire is realised. When at last the perfect Man appears, the key to all nature is found, every creature falls into its place and finds its Interpreter, and the purpose of creation is at last made manifest. The Theory of Exfoliation then differs from that very specialised form of Evolution which has been adopted by modern science, in this particular among others: that it fixes the attention on that which appears last in order of Time, as the most important in order of causation, rather than on that which appears first; and recalls to us the fact that often in any succession of phenomena, that which is first in order of precedence and importance is the last to be externalised. Thus in the growth of a plant we find leaf after leaf appearing, petal within petal--a continual exfoliation of husks, sepals, petals, stamens and what-not; but the object of all this movement, and that which in a sense sets it all in motion, namely the seed, is the very last thing of all to be manifested. Or when a volcano breaks out--first of all we have a cracking and upheaval of superficial layers of ground, then of layers below these, then the outflow of lava, and _last of all_ the uprush of the inner fires and forces which set it all agoing. What appears first in time, or in the outer world is--in the case of the building of a house, the making of bricks; in the case of the flower, the outermost bracts; in the case of a volcano, the stirring of the surface of the ground; and in the case of Life on the Earth, the appearance of protoplasms and primordial cells. The bricks are not the cause of the house (if indeed the word "cause" should be used here at all) but rather the house--or the conception of the house--is the cause of the bricks; and the cells are not the origin of Man, but Man is the original of the