Scientific research also leads to the same conclusions in respect to the incompleteness of Nature’s handiwork, which it is the function of art and culture to amend and improve. Everywhere the correcting hand and contriving brain of man are needed to eliminate the worthless and noxious productions, in which Nature is so fatally prolific, and to foster and develop those that are useful and salutary, thus beautifying and ennobling all forms of vegetable and animal life. By a like process man himself has attained his present pre-eminence. Through long ages of strife and struggle he has emerged from brutishness and barbarism, and rising by a slow, spiral ascent, scarcely perceptible for generations, has been able gradually to “Move upward, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die.” The more man increases in wisdom and intellectual capacity, the more efficient he becomes as a co-worker with the good principle. At the same time, every advance which he makes in civilization brings with it some new evil for him to overcome; or, as the Parsi would express it mythologically, every conquest achieved by Ahuramazda and his allies stimulates Angrômainyush and his satellites to renewed exertions, who convert the most useful discoveries, like dynamite, into instruments of diabolical devastation. The opening of the Far West in the United States to agriculture and commerce, and the completion of the Pacific Railroad, not only served to multiply and diffuse the gifts of the beneficent and bountiful spirit (_speñtô mainyush_), but also facilitated the propagation and spread of the plagues of the grasshopper and the Colorado beetle. The power of destruction insidiously concealed in the minutest insect organism often exceeds that of the tornado and the earthquake, and baffles the most persistent efforts of human ingenuity to resist it. The genius and energy of Pasteur were devoted for years to the task of detecting and destroying a microscopic parasite, which threatened to ruin for ever the silk industry of France; and the Phylloxera and Doryphora still continue to ravage with comparative impunity the vineyards of Europe and the potato-fields of America, defying at once all the appliances of science for their extermination and all the attempts of casuistic theology to reconcile such scourges with a perfectly benevolent and omnipotent Creator and Ruler of the Universe. It is the observation of phenomena like these that confirms the modern Parsi in the faith of his fathers, and reveals to him, in the operations of nature and the conflicts of life, unquestionable evidences of a contest between warring elements personified as Hormazd and Ahriman, the ultimate issue of which is to be the complete triumph of the former and the consequent purification and redemption of the world from the curse of evil. The Parsi, however, recognizes no Saviour, and repudiates as absurd and immoral any scheme of atonement whereby the