pledge that submersion would not be again used as a punishment for sinners. The universal ruler was conceived to be an individual of transcendent power and respectability, but was supposed to spend the most of his time and a good deal of anxiety on the regulation and repair of his illustrious likenesses. The history of intellectual evolution is the history of disillusionment. The stars, we now know, are not hatchways, but worlds. They burn because they are fire. They blaze and circle in obedience to their own unchangeable inertias, just as the earth does. They blazed and wheeled when the elemental matters of the earth mingled indistinguishably with the vapours of the sun, and they will blaze and wheel when the last inhabitant of this clod has dissolved into the everlasting atoms. The earth is not the capital of cosmos nor the subject of celestial anxiety. The earth is a satrap of the sun—a subordinate among servants, not a sovereign with a retinue of stars. The earth and its contents were not made for man. They were not made at all. They were evolved. The concaves of the sea have been hollowed, the mountains upheaved, and the continents planted and peopled, by the same tendencies as those that hold the universes in their grasp. The primal matters of the earth came out of the substance of the sun, and by the play and activity of these elements and the play and activity of their derivatives were evolved all the multitudinous forms of land, fluid, plant, animal, and society. The flowers that ‘blush unseen’ do not necessarily ‘waste their sweetness on the desert air,’ as the poet so melodiously imagines. The colours and scents of flowers serve their purposes—which are to secure the services of insects in fertilisation—quite as well when unperceived, as when perceived by human senses. The non-human races of beings were not made for human beings. They were evolved—the higher forms from the lower forms, and the lower forms from still lower—just as the higher societies of men have been evolved, under the eye of history, out of barbarism and savagery. They are our ancestors. They have made human life and civilisation possible. They made their homes on primeval land patches when the continents we creep over were sleeping in the seas. They lived and loved and suffered and died in order that a being intelligent enough to analyse himself and recreant enough to pick their bones might come into the world.