If the foregoing incident conveys any lesson, it is this, that neither singly nor collectively are scientists exempt from error, especially when they deal with a remote past, which no one has observed. The attempt to reconstruct the past by means of inference alone produces, not history, but romance. Doctor Gregory’s genealogy of Man displayed in the American Museum is quite as much the fruit of imagination as Jaggar’s Kilauean fantasy. The sham pedigree bears like witness to the ingenuity of the human mind, but, if anyone is tempted by its false show of science to take it seriously, let him think of the bombs of Kenakakoe. AFTERWORD With the close of the nineteenth century the hour hand of biological science had completed another revolution. One after another, the classic systems of evolution had passed into the discard, as its remorseless progress registered their doom. The last of these systems, De-Vriesianism, enjoyed a meteoric vogue in the first years of the present century, but it, too, has gone into eclipse with the rise of rediscovered Mendelism. Notwithstanding all these reverses, however, the evolutionary theory still continues to number a host of steadfast adherents. Some of its partisans uphold it upon antiquated grounds. Culturally speaking, such men still live in the days of Darwin, and fail to realize that much water has passed under the bridge since then. It has other protagonists, however, who are thoroughly conversant with modern data, and fully aware, in consequence, of the inadequacy of all existent formulations of the evolutional hypothesis. Minds of the latter type are proof, apparently, against any sort of disillusionment, and it is manifest that their attitude is determined by some consideration other than the actual results of research. This other consideration is monistic metaphysics. In defect of factual confirmation, evolution is demonstrated aprioristically from the principle of the minimum. The scope of this methodological principle is to simplify or unify causation by dispensing with all that is superfluous in the way of explanation. In olden days, it went by the name of Occam’s Razor and was worded thus: _Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem_—“Things are not to be multiplied without necessity.” Evolution meets the requirements of this principle. It simplifies the problem of organic origins by reducing the number of ancestors to a minimum. Therefore, argues the evolutionist, evolution must be true.