The severe strictures that I have passed on the sophisms and trickery of this "ecclesiastical evolution" are not directed against the person and the character of Father Wasmann, but the Jesuitical system which he represents. I do not doubt that this able naturalist (who is personally unknown to me) has written his book in good faith, and has an honourable ambition to reconcile the irreconcilable contradictions between natural evolution and the story of supernatural creation. But this reconciliation of reason and superstition is only possible at the price of a sacrifice of the reason itself. We find this in the case of all the other Jesuits--Fathers Cathrein, Braun, Besmer, Cornet, Linsmeier, and Muckermann--whose ambiguous "Jesuitical science" is aptly dealt with in the article of R. H. Francé that I mentioned before (No. 22 of the _Freie Wort_, 16th February, 1904, Frankfort). This interesting attempt of Father Wasmann's does not stand alone. Signs are multiplying that the Church militant is about to enter on a systematic campaign. I heard from Vienna on the 17th of February, that on the previous day (which happened to be my birthday), a Jesuit, Father Giese, had, in a well-received address, admitted not only evolution in general, but even its application to man, and declared it to be reconcilable with Catholic dogmas--and this at a crowded meeting of "catechists"! It is important to note that in a new Catholic cyclopædia, Benziger's _Library of Science_, the first three volumes (issued at Einsiedeln and Cologne, 1904) deal very fully and ably with the chief problems of evolution: the first with the formation of the earth, the second with spontaneous generation, the third with the theory of descent. The author of them, Father M. Gander, makes most remarkable concessions to our theory, and endeavours to show that they are not inconsistent with the Bible or the dogmatic treatises of the chief fathers and schoolmen. But, though there is a profuse expenditure of sophistical logic in these Jesuitical efforts, Gander will hardly succeed in misleading thoughtful people. One of his characteristic positions is that spontaneous generation (as the development of organised living things by purely material processes) is inconceivable, but that it might be made possible "by a special Divine arrangement." In regard to the descent of man from other animals (which he grants), he makes the reserve that the soul must in any case have been produced by a special creative act.