The student of adaptations has no longer a moral thesis to maintain; he tries to understand how a contrivance acts, what advantage it confers upon its possessor, and by what steps it was perfected. The minute variations of species are as capricious as the form of the stones which accumulate at the foot of a precipice; natural selection turns fortuitous variations to account for the advantage of the species as a builder might turn to account the shapes of the stones. Man himself can employ variations for frivolous or even base purposes, as when he produces toy-spaniels or bull-dogs.[50] The adjustments of organic structures often move our wonder by their perfection. One reason why they so far exceed the adjustments made by wind, frost, or moving water is that the process has been so protracted; in a worm or an insect we see the last stage of an adaptation which has been continuously at work for untold geological periods. Another reason is that the thing adapted is alive, sensitive, and capable of responding to the subtlest imaginable influences. _Darwinism and Non-biological Studies._—The theory of organic evolution has already produced a visible effect upon non-biological studies. Bagehot has applied Darwinian principles to the interpretation of history and politics. Philologists recognise a process very like that of natural selection in the modification of words. The usages of language are inherited from generation to generation; one idiom competes with another, that persisting which best suits the temper or the convenience of the nation. Philology has like zoology its chains of descent, its breeds or dialects, its species or languages, its fossils (dead languages), its dominant and declining forms, its vestiges (such as letters, still retained, though no longer sounded). Psychology is already in part experimental and evolutionary, and seems as if it would attach itself more and more closely to physiology, detaching itself in the same measure from metaphysics. The change may be attributed to two growing convictions: (1) That the experimental method is more trustworthy than the speculative; and (2) that the mind of man is not a thing apart, but an enhanced form of powers manifest in the lower animals. Sociology finds its most practicable and its most urgent sphere of work in the problems of selection and race, which are naturally examined in the light of Darwinian principles. The new study of Comparative Religion aims at the impartial examination of all forms of religious experience, and is evolutionary in proportion as it is scientific. One of its conclusions, by no means universally accepted as yet, is the recognition of conscience as "the organised result of the social experiences of many generations" (Galton). Comparative Religion can already show in outline how by slow degrees magical rites passed into polytheistic worship, how polytheism became simplified and elevated, and how ethical motives at length became influential if not