inference that such a fact ever occurred could be reasonably drawn; just as it is possible to draw the inference of special creation by reasonable deduction from the evidence that tends to establish it as a safe conclusion. But if there has ever been such an instance of the evolution of any known species of animal out of other species shown by satisfactory proof, or if we assume such an occurrence in the past as the theory calls for, what reason have we to suppose that the process of evolution is still going on, and to expect it to go on to the end of time? We must judge of the future by the past, for we have no other means of judging it. The past and the present both show, so far as we can yet perceive by the facts, that each distinct and peculiar type of animal life remains a perfect and completed production, however it was fashioned or grew into that type; and that, so far as we have any means of actual knowledge, no crosses of different races of that animal produce anything but incidental variations of structure and mode of life. It is a mere hypothesis that they produce distinct species. Apply this to the most important of the supposed connections between different animals according to the theory of evolution--that between man and the monkey. The theory calls for the intermediate link or links. Nothing can be yet found that shows the pedigree without eking it out by general reasoning, and by assumptions that are more or less imaginary. But suppose that the chain of proof were complete, what would it show? It would show that the process of evolution has culminated in man, as its crown and summit, and has there stopped. For, whatever may have been the length of time required for the production of this result, we know what the product is. We have the history of man as an animal for a period of time that has been quite long enough to show that, after he had become in his essential structure as an animal what we know him to be, no subsequent intermingling of the races or families into which the species became divided has produced any change in his essential structure, or any new organs or any differences but differences in the development of powers which are to be found in him at all the stages of his known existence as parts of his characteristic animal structure. The period of his known existence is certainly infinitely small when compared with the whole indefinite future. It is long enough, however, to afford some basis of reasoning about the future; and, short as it is, it tends very strongly to show that the further development of man on earth is to be chiefly a moral and intellectual development; that in physical structure he is a completed type; and that whatever superiorities of mere animal life he may attain to hereafter are to be such improvements as can be worked out, within the limits of his animal constitution, by the science which his accumulating experience and knowledge will enable him to apply to the