masterpieces of architecture, sculpture, and painting date as a rule from long before our time, some of them nearly twenty-five hundred years back. As has been very well said, the man who talks much about progress in our time usually knows only the history of human thought in his own generation, and not very much about that. In nearly every important phase of human achievement, we are, in present accomplishment, far behind the great predecessors. In our generation, {15} we are confessedly imitators in every phase of aesthetic expression. In painting, sculpture, art and literature, our models are all in the past, and we are quite frank in confessing that we are doing no work at all so good as the work of our forefathers of many generations and sometimes many centuries ago. Whence, then, comes the idea of progress? It has obtained most of its vogue from the theory of evolution; and the lack of evidence for evolution in general, in spite of the persuasion on the part of many educated people that there are proofs for it, can be very well judged from the corresponding lack of evidence with regard to progress in humanity. There is complete absence of proof for this latter, when the situation with regard to human achievement in the really great things of human life is examined. Indeed, it would be amusing were it not amazing to think how readily we have come to accept notions for which there is so little substantiation. To many this will doubtless seem a surprising declaration to make, after all that has been written, and universally accepted as most people think, with regard to evolution by the great minds of the nineteenth century. What evolution means, however, is summed up in the theory of descent, that is that living things as we know them now, have all come from simpler forms and perhaps all from a single form. The only other phase of interest in evolution is what concerns the theory of natural selection, which is supposed by many people to {16} have been demonstrated in the nineteenth century. It may be well for those who think thus to have recalled to them what a recent writer on the subject, himself a distinguished investigator in biology, a professor at Leland Stanford University, where under the influence of President Jordan biology is thoroughly yet conservatively cultivated, has to say with regard to these theories and the objective evidence for them. Professor Vernon L. Kellogg in his "Darwinism To-day," [Footnote 2] p. 18, though himself an evolutionist and a Darwinian, says: "What may for the moment detain us, however, is a reference to the curiously almost completely subjective character of the evidence for both the theory of descent and natural selection. Biology has been until now a science of observation; it is beginning to be one of observation plus experiment. The evidence for its principal theories might be expected to be thoroughly objective in character; to be of the nature of positive, observed and perhaps