Readers of Matthew Arnold--an author whose intellectual vision was great, and whose style is one of the literary ornaments of the last century--will recall how he was taken with what he called "Mr. Darwin's famous proposition" that "our ancestor was a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits." Mr. Arnold, the apostle of culture, played again and again around this sonorous phrase. Far be it from me to enter upon any discussion of the Darwinian hypothesis of the genesis of the human race. On this large theme the last word has not been said. Knowledge must grow from more to more before we can posit anything definite on a subject veiled at present in inscrutable mystery. But, in its essence, the evolutionary theory has soaked into our modern thought. The literature and the progressive teaching of our latter day are drenched with it. It certainly can be said of it, that it explains many things which have heretofore seemed inexplicable, and marks a great advance in popular intelligence. But the most ambitious generalization is only a temporary expedient. Fact will merge in fact; law will melt into a larger law; one deep of knowledge will call unto another deep; much that the proudest scientist of our day calls knowledge will vanish away; many theories now popular will be dissected and pruned and will be found to be "such stuff as dreams are made on," before the most enlightened humanity of a future age catches any one phase of nature in its snare and compresses it into rigid laws. Nevertheless, the ancestor of man was brutish, and his descendants are where they are. Whether or not primeval man was the rather unpicturesque creature described by Mr. Arnold, he was the norm from which has come "the heir of all the ages." From the cave-dweller, the aboriginal savage, have been evolved Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Milton, Dante, Newton, Gladstone, Pascal, La Place, Lincoln, Emerson, Channing, Martineau, Thomas a' Kempis, Phillips Brooks, Darwin and Herbert Spencer. How magnificent the ascent! How glorious the progression! Man, once the companion of the Dragons of the prime That tare each other in their slime, has flowered into an intellectual, reasoning, moral being--"how infinite in faculty; in form and moving how express and admirable; in action how like an angel; in apprehension how like a god."