All over Western Europe such associations or academies for the building up of the New Philosophy (as it was called here) came into existence. It is a fact which is strangely overlooked at the present day, when the assumption is made that the acquirement of a knowledge of Greek grammar is the traditional and immemorial occupation of Oxford students--that until the modern days of the eighteenth century (‘modern’ in the history of Oxford) Greek was less known in Oxford than Hebrew is at present, and that the study of Nature--Nature-knowledge and Nature-control--was the appropriate occupation of her learned men. It is indeed a fact that the very peculiar classical education at present insisted on in Oxford, and imposed by her on the public schools of the country, is a modern innovation, an unintentional and, in a biological sense, ‘morbid’ outgrowth of that ‘Humanism’ to which a familiarity with the dead languages was, but is no longer, the pathway. 4. THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. What is sometimes called the scientific movement, but may be more appropriately described as the Nature-searching movement, rapidly attained an immense development. In the latter half of the last century this culminated in so complete a knowledge of the movements of the heavenly bodies, their chemical nature and physical condition--so detailed a determination of the history of the crust of this earth and of the living things upon it, of the chemical and physical processes which go on in Man and other living things, and of the structure of Man as compared with the animals most like him, and of the enormous length of time during which Man has existed on the earth--that it became possible to establish a general doctrine of the evolution of the kosmos, with more special detail in regard to the history of this earth and the development of Man from a lower animal ancestry. Animals were, in their turn, shown to have developed from simplest living matter, and this from less highly elaborated compounds of chemical ‘elements’ differentiated at a still earlier stage of evolution. There is, it may be said without exaggeration, no school or body of thinkers at the present day who are acquainted with the facts now ascertained, which denies the orderly evolution of the kosmos by the regular operation of a more or less completely ascertained series of properties resident in the material of which it consists.[2] The process of evolution--the interaction of these ascertainable, if not fully ascertained properties--has led (it is held), in the case of the cooling cinder which we call the earth--by an inevitable and predestined course--to the formation of that which we call living matter and eventually of Man himself. From this process all disorderly or arbitrary interferences must, it seems, be excluded. The old fancies as to presiding demons or fairies--which it was imagined had for their business to interrupt the supposed feeble and limited efforts of Nature, as yet unexplored and