sounds and feathered forms, will be, in that terrible time, turned to stone; the radiant woods and fields, the home of the myriads and the green play-places of the shadows, will, like all that live, move, and breathe, have rotted into the everlasting lumber of the elements. There will be no Europe then, no pompous philosophies, no hellish rich, and no gods. All will have suffered indescribable refrigeration. The earth will be a fluidless, lifeless, sunless cinder, unimaginably dead and desolate, a decrepit and pitiful old ruin falling endlessly among heartless immensities, the universal tomb of the activities. The universe is an evolution. Change is as extensive as time and space. The present has come out of that which has been, and will enter into and determine that which is to be. Everything has a biography. Everything has evolved—_everything_—from the murmur on the lips of the speechless babe to the soul of the poet, and from the molecule to Jehovah. VIII. The Factors of Organic Evolution. The animal kingdom represents one of the two grand branches of the organic universe. It has been evolved—evolved in a manner as simple and straightforward as it is revolting. It has all been brought about by _partiality_ or _selection_. Generations of beings have come into existence. The individual members of each generation have differed from each other—differed in size, strength, speed, colour, shape, sagacity, luck, and likelihood of life. No two beings, not even those born from the same womb, are in all respects identical. Hardships have come. They have come from the inanimate universe in the form of floods, fires, frosts, accidents, diseases, droughts, storms, and the like; from other species, who were competitors or enemies; and from unbrotherly members of the same species. Some have survived, but the great majority have perished. Only a fraction, and generally an appallingly small fraction, of each generation of a species have lived to maturity. The lobster lays 10,000 eggs in a season, yet the mortality is such that the number of lobsters do not increase from one year to another. The elephant is the slowest breeder of all animals, yet, if they should all live, the offspring of a single pair in 750 years would, according to Darwin, number nearly 19,000,000. It has been shown that at the normal rate of increase of English sparrows, if none were to die save of old age, it would take but twenty years for a single pair to give one sparrow to every square inch in the State of Indiana.[1] A single cyclops (one of the humbler crustaceans) may have 5,000,000 descendants in a season. One aphis will produce 100 young, and these young will reproduce in like manner for ten generations in a season, when, if they should all live, there would be a quintillion of young. A female white ant, when adult, does nothing but lie in a cell and lay eggs. She lays 80,000 eggs a day regularly for several months. An oyster lays 2,000,000 eggs in a