It seems worth while, in order to secure a calm and unprejudiced consideration for the teachings of Darwinism, to point out to such persons that, as a matter of fact, whatever views we may hold with regard to a soul and the Christian doctrines, they cannot be in the smallest degree affected by the admission that man has been derived from ape-like ancestors by a process of natural selection, so long as the demonstrable fact, not denied by any sane person, is admitted, namely, that every individual man grows by a process of natural modification from a homogeneous egg-cell or corpuscle. Assuredly it cannot lower our conception of man’s dignity if we have to regard him as “the flower of all the ages,” bursting from the great stream of life which has flowed on through countless epochs with one increasing purpose, rather than as an isolated, miraculous being, put together abnormally from elemental clay, and cut off by such portentous origin from his fellow animals, and from that gracious Nature to whom he yearns with filial instinct, knowing her, in spite of fables, to be his dear mother. A certain number of thoughtful persons admit the development of man’s body by natural processes from ape-like ancestry, but believe in the non-natural intervention of a Creator at a certain _definite_ stage in that development, in order to introduce into the animal which was at that moment a man-like ape, something termed “a conscious soul,” in virtue of which he became an ape-like man. It appears to me perfectly legitimate and harmless for individuals to make such an assumption if their particular form of philosophy or of religion requires it. Such an assumption does not in any way traverse the inferences from facts to which Darwinism leads us; at the same time zoological science does not, and cannot be expected to, give any support to such an assumption. The gratuitous and harmless nature of the assumption so far as zoological science is concerned, and accordingly the baselessness of the hostility to Darwinism of those who choose to make it, may be seen by the consideration of a parallel series of facts and assumptions, which puts the matter clearly enough in its true light.