I shall only add one or two more brief remarks. Those who charge theologians with making unfounded assumptions should be guiltless of making them themselves. The warning against falling into this error may be profitably taken to heart by both parties to this controversy. It is affirmed that the constitution of nature bears everywhere the indications of systematic upward progression. I ask, is this systematic upward progression everywhere true of man? Are there no where indications of retrogression? Europeans generally during the last two thousand years have progressed, although even this is not universally true, for some of the fine arts attained to greater perfection in the ancient than in the modern world. But has the Hindoo race progressed during the last three thousand years? Have the Chinese? Is it not true that the progress of these two races has been one of considerable retrogression? Where is the progress made by the Negro races from the first dawnings of their history? Yet these three races form more than half of the human family. Again, have the Arab races progressed since the days of Abraham? Are the Mahommedan races in a state of gradual improvement? These are questions to which a definite answer must be returned before the proposition above referred to can be esteemed a solution of all the problems of human history. It will perhaps be replied that nature is gradually extinguishing these unprogressive races, under the pressure of her inexorable laws. Yet they constitute an overwhelming majority of the human race, and it is strange to talk of this progressive improvement of the human race as a great law of nature, if the mode of improvement be the extinction of the great majority of mankind. But are the Hindoo, Chinese, Negro, and other unprogressive races less numerous than they were three thousand years ago? The evidence is all the other way. We want present facts and not theories of the future. It has been affirmed, that “The survival of the fittest is the stern law of nature. The invariable action of law of itself eliminates the unfit. Progress is necessary to existence. Extinction is the doom of Retrogression.” These assertions may receive their fulfilment in some period of the distant future, but they certainly do not agree with the past history of man. Whatever progress the European races may be capable of, certain conditions of climate form an inexorable barrier to their supplanting the Negro, the Hindoo, or the Chinese, and we know that European blood in certain climates has actually degenerated.