of cruelty for example no rational account, we believe, has yet been given; it is connected with no human appetite, and seems to gratify no human object of desire; but if we can be shown to have inherited it from animal progenitors, the mystery of its existence is at least in part explained. In the event of this surmise being substantiated, moral phantasms, with their mediaeval trappings, would for ever disappear; individual responsibility would be reduced within reasonable limits; the difficulty of the question respecting free will would shrink to comparatively narrow proportions; but it does not seem likely that the love of virtue and the hatred of vice would be diminished; on the contrary, it seems likely that they would be practically intensified, while a more practical direction would certainly be given to the science of ethics as a system of moral training and a method of curing moral disease. It is needless to say how great has been the influence of the doctrine of Evolution, or rather perhaps of the method of investigation to which it has given birth, upon the study of history, especially the history of institutions. Our general histories will apparently have to be almost rewritten from that point of view. It is only to be noted, with regard to the treatment of history, that the mere introduction of a physical nomenclature, however elaborate and apparently scientific, does not make anything physical which before was not so, or exclude from human actions, of which history is the aggregate, any element not of a physical kind. We are impressed, perhaps, at first with a sense of new knowledge when we are told that human history is "an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation." But a little reflection suggests to us that such a philosophy is vitiated by the assumption involved in the word "matter," and that the philosophy of history is in fact left exactly where it was before. The superior complexity of high civilization is a familiar social fact which gains nothing in clearness by the importation of mechanical or physiological terms.