The evolutions of Darwinism are therefore presumably to be intelligently apprehended only by the Boston transcendentalist, nourished on mackerel salted to the _n_th power, and wearing a baked bean in his vermiform appendix. The evolutions and involutions of a maiden effort at Dress Parade are incomprehensible as the ravings of a salaried jaw-smith in a labor strike, who has burst into a profuse state of prevarication as the rosy beer-froth mantles his sublime cheek. True wisdom is best exemplified by a turtle withdrawn into his casemate; even the overestimated he-goat is less occult and dignified. The popular platform at Vassar is a free coinage of ice cream, 16 to 1, and a currency based on unsecured bonds of wedlock that have defaulted their dividends would be unanimously spurned. On the western frontier a presentable university can be set up with one bottle of sulphuric acid, a four-foot telescope and two ball bats. In some portions of the south a professor who boasts a bicycle kyphosis, writes polysyllabic profundities in long-waisted chirography, and combs his hair like John C. Calhoun, is impregnably intrenched. Thus do educational standards pulsate and palpitate in different sections of our beloved country. In China, where the grasshopper is a burden and mice are legal tender, it is not so. The tests for a civil service examination of candidates for concubine to the emperor are alike in all the provinces. The Chicago board of trade operator, who rises with the lark at 8:45 A. M., and five drinks later is ready for business, scorns the effeminate chappie who had his dog's tongue split in order to crease his pants. But in Chicago, where even the Goddess of Liberty frequently requires a chaperone after dark, such things will happen in spite of the most stringent police regulations. Besides which they are mostly incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial. These evolutions and involutions of Dress Parade are to be wrought out by an incipient soldiery, which three months hence will be seeking the hen and ham of glory at the red mouth of smoke house and chicken coop, lucky also not to be subject to rigid inspection by a state entomologist. Now they are intangible as the man in the moon, ineffable as the man in the honeymoon. Evolutions sometimes go backward. On the present occasion there is no restriction--everything goes, as the young woman said when he drifted slowly out of her life on a lumber raft. The evolutions are meritorious in design and multifarious in execution; likewise in the manual of arms. The flabergasted novices stand inextricable, like some brittle Rosamond tangled in silken skeins to the queen's taste. You may bray a crank in the mortar, but his wheels will still whirl. When the irreclaimable faddist bestrides his foible, give him due latitude. When the ambient air is full of ozone and things of that sort, look out for thunder-storms.