The eye is an instrument for appreciating ripples in the ether. These are generated by violently revolving electric charges associated with each atom of matter, and are delayed, stopped, and reflected in various ways, by other matter which they encounter in their swift passage through the ethereal medium. From long practice and inherited instinct we are able, from the small fraction of these ripples which enter our eyes, to make inferences regarding the obstructive objects from which they have been shimmered and scattered. It is like inferring the ships and boats and obstacles in a harbour from the pattern of the reflected ripples which cross each other on the surface of the water. The precision and clearness with which we can thus gain knowledge concerning things beyond our reach, and the extraordinary amount of information that can be thus conveyed, are nothing short of miraculous: though, again, we are liable to treat sight as an everyday and commonplace faculty. We are not, however, directly conscious of the ripples, though they are the whole exciting cause of the sensation; our real consciousness and perception are of the objects which have invested the ripples with their peculiarities, have imprinted upon them certain characteristics, and made them what they are. The eye is able to analyse all this, as the ear analyses the tones of an orchestra. * * * * * ANCESTORS.—In the first instance _human_ ancestors may be considered, and a family tree drawn for any one child; from which he will learn how large a number of persons combine to form his ancestry. The tree can also represent the converging effect of inter-marriages, so that ultimate descent from a common ancestor is not an impossibility, if the facts of biology and ethnology point in that direction—as it appears they do. The probable though remote relationship existing between all the branches of the human family may be suggested by an inverted tree descending from some remotest ancestor: for whom Noah is as good a name as any other. ROSE.—The doctrine of the ascent of man may be found in some cases to conflict with early religious teaching. If so, offence and iconoclasm should be carefully avoided; and if the teacher feels that he can conscientiously draw a distinction, between the persistent vital or spiritual essence of man, and the temporary material vehicle which displays his individual existence amid terrestrial surroundings, he may with advantage do so. The second or higher aspect of the origin of man is dealt with in Clause XII. The history and origin of the spiritual part of man is unknown, and can only be rightly spoken of in terms of mysticism and poetry: the history of the bodily and much of the mental part is studied in the biological facts of evolution.