It is now time to pause and see what conclusions these facts have led our scientist to draw. I have called attention to the striking resemblance between man and the superior animals; in the development of the embryo, in the material of which they are composed, and in the use of organs they are alike; and especially very much alike in physical structure, the skeleton of man only slightly varying from that of the higher order of animals; and that resemblance in something like gradation exists throughout the organic world. Of course there are marked structural variations even in closely allied species, and we have seen that there is a tendency in species to vary and also to preserve the variation; and where the peculiarity of the variation is favorable to the individual it is almost certain to be preserved by the process of natural selection. New varieties thus produced may be expected to produce still other variations that will remove them further than ever from the stock from which their parents came, until the variation amounts to what our naturalists denominate specific difference. By this process what we now call varieties may eventually become species, as our species, according to the evolutionists, were once nothing more than varieties; and the groups which naturalists classify as genera, families, order, classes, etc., are but the remains of still older species, which have continued their existence side by side with the new species, which have been produced from them by this process of variation; and but for the fact that so many intermediate species have become extinct, they claim that the multifarious forms of organic life could be traced, through all the minute variations that have occurred, back to a common origin; even back to the mysterious substance in which life seems to generate--protoplasm. Such are the basic principles on which is grounded the theory of evolution, as I understand the subject from the works of its advocates, though my effort to be brief may have rendered my statement of those principles very imperfect.