We must assume that since the beginning of life organisms have been subjected to countless insults. We can scarcely speak of a wound in an Amæba; but these insults have always been made good, and whenever this was not the case, that particular organism came to an end. As these organisms developed into more complicated ones, the possible insults became more serious, more complicated; and the organisms took adaptive measures so as to be superior to them. This action, I have no hesitation in declaring, became by heredity a habit. The whole creature became so thoroughly 'imbued' (for want of a better word) with the finding of ways and means for meeting sudden, serious conditions, that it now acts directly, and produces by a short-cut, with the least amount of time and with the smallest possible waste of material, that which meets the occasion, thereby saving the life of the individual and that of the race. This we cannot but call reasonable and to the purpose, although it is all carried out by _causæ efficientes_ without there being any _causæ finales_. GEOLOGICAL TIME AND EVOLUTION. One million years is a stretch of time beyond our conception. We can arrive at a more or less adequate understanding of what a million individuals or concrete things means. Several Continental nations can put more than a million men into the field. We can gaze at a building which contains as many bricks; and we know that our own body is composed of millions of millions of cells. No such help applies to time, because that itself is an entirely relative, abstract conception. We can imagine what one hundred years are like--a span of time seemingly short to the hale and hearty octogenarian, enormous to the child, totally inapplicable to certain animals whose whole life is crowded into one single day. Astronomers have long ceased to reckon distances by miles or any other understandable unit. They express the distances between us and the stars and nebulæ by 'years of light.' Try to imagine a unit of length equal to that which is passed through by light (186,000 miles per second) in one year. Not so very long ago the enormous distances resulting from astronomical calculations were looked upon as the most serious objection to the correctness of the astronomers' views as to the distances which separate our globe from the nearest fixed stars. We have not yet accustomed ourselves to reckoning time by some similar broadly-conceived standard--say æons of so many thousand years each.