And because they were supreme they were colored and transformed by his humanizing and anthropomorphizing whimseys. He was always reading into them his own charming qualities of mind and heart, at the same time that he was imitating their own quickness and alertness. Indeed, natural life always appealed not so much to his imagination as to his fancy. He was absorbed in nature as a child is absorbed in its playthings. With all his minuteness of knowledge, he never fully and unqualifiedly faced the two great facts of the natural world, the struggle for existence, and the survival of the fittest. He exaggerated and instinctively transformed the natural world, and to the using of it as the source and stimulus of his own acute poetic ingenuity, devoted all his energies and interest.” The criticism is brilliant, but superficial; and its kindly temper does not atone for its total injustice and perversion of values. It is pure assumption, in the first place, to call the “struggle for existence, and the survival of the fittest” “the two great facts of the natural world.” Who authorizes the ranking of those facts as prime or principal? Why not assign the highest place to the continuity of life, and the conservation of advantages, and the advance of types? These are quite as impressive facts as those others. And if they are suggestive of quite other inferences neither Gibson nor any nature lover need be disparaged for choosing to dwell upon those inferences. If he, like a growing company of later students and observers, was impressed with the fraternity of all lives, great and small, with the analogies between the human and the dumb creation, and felt the kinship of even insects and birds, with their later and more favored human cousins,--if we may not use a closer term,--why should this keener insight be called a “whimsey,” and this deeper divination a “fancy”? And because he had a nature which thrilled and fired with the delight of knowledge and all the mental activity which it sets in motion, why should he be accused of using his growing store of that knowledge as a wine to warm his fancy and a spur to the making of similes? The fact is, Gibson not only saw and faced the law of struggle and of survival, but he saw a great deal more. And if he did not dwell upon these facts with the lugubrious emphasis which characterized so many of his contemporaries in science, it was not because he saw them out of relation, but in truer and clearer perspective. There has been too little sympathy, too little of the “humanizing and anthropomorphizing” spirit in scientific research. Gibson was a prophet, in advance of his day. What he was doing is fast becoming the dominant spirit of investigators. And many more laws and principles will be laid bare when men come to realize that all living things are of one blood, than are to be discerned through the cold and unsympathetic gaze of old-fashioned science. Gibson’s habit, moreover,