Since Darwin many efforts have been made to improve his theory by supplementing it with others. Hugo DeVries, for example, believed that he had solved the problem of the survival of variations which need to be complete before they can be useful. He discovered a bank of evening primroses on an English hillside which seemed to be in the very act of producing new species--not by degrees but all at once. It was announced throughout the world that organic evolution had proved itself experimentally, though not along Darwinian lines. The variations here were too marked to be called variations, so they were called “mutations.” But the primroses were but hybrids, and what had been seen was not the evolution of new species but the action of the law of mixed heredity long before formulated by Mendel. The new species were only throw-backs, revealing hereditary traits which had been latent in their immediate ancestors, as when a boy resembles not his father but his grandfather. More recently a school of biologists has risen whose members call themselves “Emergent Evolutionists.” According to their idea, the finger of God occasionally “emerges” so plainly that man can see it. Here again we have the idea of sudden mutations, where the ordinary course of events seems at certain points to be broken by the impulse of a higher law--as when life, sensation, reason, or man first appeared. Alfred Russell Wallace, Darwin’s co-discoverer of the “law” of Natural Selection, laid the foundation for this conception as long ago as 1889. More recently men like Lloyd Morgan; General Smuts; Herbert Spencer Jennings, of Johns Hopkins University; Sir Bertram C. A. Windel, professor of anthropology in Saint Michael’s College, Toronto, and many others, have sought to give Emergency its place among the recognized hypotheses of science. But, as far as I am aware, it has never yet been completely stated, nor any logical reason given why the emergence at one point in the evolutionary scale differs except in degree from the emergence of any event, even the most trifling. Once we accept the belief that matter is a mere instrument in the hands of something which is not matter, it seems necessary to regard all phenomena as the emergence either of the direct power of God or of the will of some creature to whom has been delegated a limited freedom. If this be the underlying idea, then a special emergence might be defined as one of so marked and rare an importance that it stands out from every day happenings, forming part of a broader rhythm whose beat is apparent only when all the great emergences of which we have evidence are taken together. Or it may go even beyond this, and stand as an event unique in man’s experience, constituting what we call a miracle.