While fully recognising these dangers, I nevertheless feel that the Jesuit Father Wasmann, and his colleagues, have--unwittingly--done a very great service to the progress of pure science. The Catholic Church, the most powerful and widespread of the Christian sects, sees itself compelled to capitulate to the idea of evolution. It embraces the most important application of the idea, Lamarck and Darwin's theory of descent, which it had vigorously combated until twenty years ago. It does, indeed, mutilate the great tree, cutting off its roots and its highest branch; it rejects spontaneous generation or archigony at the bottom, and the descent of man from animal ancestors above. But these exceptions will not last. Impartial biology will take no notice of them, and the religious creed will at length determine that the more complex species have been evolved from a series of simpler forms according to Darwinian principles. The belief in a supernatural creation is restricted to the production of the earliest and simplest stem-forms, from which the "natural species" have taken their origin; Wasmann gives that name to all species that are demonstrably descended from a common stem-form; in other words, to what other classifiers call "stems" or "phyla." The 4,000 species of ants in his system, which he believes to be genetically related, are comprised by him in one "natural species." On the other hand, man forms one isolated "natural species" for himself, without any connection with the other mammals.