second one was sinking deeper and deeper through the shafts of coal and iron mines into the dark caverns of material earth. “No action,” said Bilharz, “which needs the assistance of a steam-engine or of any other mechanism can trace its origin to idealism nor can it end in idealism.” I suggested that every animal body is a mechanism and that its continuous evolution seems to indicate that the world is heading for a definite ideal. Bilharz flew up like a hornet when he heard the word evolution. A lively discussion was going on in those days between the biological sciences and theology, Huxley and many other scientists championing the claims of Darwin’s evolution theory and the theologians defending the claims of revealed religion. I was too young and too untutored to understand much of those learned discussions, but Bilharz followed them with feverish anxiety. His theological arguments did not appeal to me, and so far as I was concerned they lost even the little force they had when Bilharz turned them against what he called American mechanism and materialism, which he tried to make responsible for the alleged materialism of the evolution theory. His political and philosophical theories based upon blind prejudice created a gap between him and me which widened every day. Here are some illustrations of it. When I described to him the election day of 1876, telling him that I and thousands of others had stood quietly and patiently hours and hours in drenching rain in front of the New York _Tribune_ building waiting for the returns which would tell us whether Hayes or Tilden was to be the supreme executive head of the United States during the coming four years; how the next day some of the newspapers had raised a howl of “fraud,” accusing the Republican party of tampering with the election returns in one of the States, but that the people of New York City and of the whole country had paid no attention, trusting implicitly to the machinery of government to straighten out crookedness if it existed, and how this dignity of American democracy thrilled me when I compared it with the rows and scandals accompanying elections in the countries of the military frontier of Austria-Hungary, he only laughed and ridiculed the whole procedure of electing by ignorant voters the supreme executive head of a nation. He told me a story of Aristides of Athens, who, being requested by a voter to write upon a shell the name of the man who was to be condemned for some crime which was not quite clear to the Athenian voter, wrote down his own name, and Aristides, the just, the noblest character of Athens, was condemned. But the condemnation of this just and noble and innocent man was, according to Bilharz, a condemnation of the Athenian democracy, whose shortcomings brought the downfall of Greek civilization, and he added that the shortcomings of American democracy would bring the downfall of the old European civilization. The Aristides story interested me much, but the