From his guide, moreover, whose methods were those that nature teaches to men who live their daily lives in her company, Conyngham learnt much of that road-craft which had raised Concepcion Vara to such a proud eminence among the rascals of Andalusia. Cordova was a good object upon which to practise, for Roman and Goth, Moor and Christian have combined to make its tortuous streets well-nigh incomprehensible to the traveller's

mind.

Here Conyngham wandered, or else he sat somnolently on a seat in the Paseo del Gran Capitan, in the shade of the orange-trees, awaiting the arrival of Concepcion Vara. He made a few acquaintances, as every traveller who is not a bear must needs do in a country where politeness and hospitality and a grave good fellowship are the natural habit of high and low alike. A bullfighter or two, who beguiled the long winter months when the rings are closed by a little innocent horse-dealing, joined him quietly in the streets, and offered him a horse, as between gentlemen of undoubted honor, at a price much below the current value. Or it was, perhaps, a beggar who came to him on the old yellow marble seat under the orange-trees, and chatted affably about his business as being bad in these times of war. Once, indeed, it was a white-haired gentleman who spoke in English, and asked some very natural questions as to the affairs that brought an Englishman to the town of Cordova. This sweet-spoken old man explained that strangers would do well to avoid all questions of politics and religion, which he classed together in one dangerous whole. Nevertheless Conyngham thought that he perceived his ancient friend the same evening hurry ing up the steps of the Jesuit College of La Campania.

Two days elapsed and Concepcion Vara made neither appearance nor sign. On the second evening Conyngham decided to go on alone, prosecuting his journey through the sparsely populated

"You will ride," the innkeeper told him, "from the Guadalquivir to the Guadiana, and if there is rain you may be a month upon the road."

Conyngham set out in the early morning, and as he threw his leg across the saddle the sun rose over the far misty hills of Ronda, and Concepcion Vara awoke from his night's rest under the wall of an olive terrace above the Bobadilla road, to begin another day of patient waiting and watching to get speech with the maid or the mistress, for he had already inaugurated what he lightly called "an affair" with Julia's flighty attendant. The sun rose also over the plains of Xeres, and lighted up the picturesque form of Esteban Larralde, in the saddle this hour and more, having learnt that Colonel Monreal's death took place an hour before Conyngham's arrival in the town of Xeres de la Frontera. The letter, therefore, had not been delivered to Colonel Monreal, and was still in Conyngham's possession.

Larralde bestrode a shocking steed, and had but an indifferent seat in the saddle, but the dust rose beneath his horse's feet, and his spurs flashed in the sunlight as this man of many parts hurried on toward Utera and Cordova. In the old Moorish palace in Ronda, General Vincente, summoned to a great council of war at Madrid, was making curt military preparations for his journey and the conveyance of his household to the capital. Señora Barenna was for the moment forgetful of her nerves in the excitement of despatching servants in advance to Toledo, where she owned a summer residence. Julia was nervously anxious to be on the road again, and showed by every word and action that restlessness of spirit which is the inheritance of hungry hearts. Estella, quiet and self-contained, attended to the details of moving a vast and formal household with a certain eagerness, which in no way resembled Julia's feverish haste. Estella seemed to be one of those happy people who know what they want.

Thus Frederick Conyngham, riding northward alone, seemed to be but a pilot to all those persons, into whose lives he had suddenly stepped as from a side issue, for they were one and all making ready to follow him to the colder plains of Castile, where existence was full of strife and ambition, of war and those inner wheels that ever jar and grind where politicians contend together for the mastery of a moment.

As he rode on, Conyngham left a message from time to time for his selfappointed servant. At the offices of the diligencias in various towns on the great road from Cordova to Madrid he left word for Concepcion Vara to follow, should the spirit of travel be still upon him, knowing that at these places, where travellers were ever passing, the tittle-tattle of the road was on the tongue of every hostler and stable help. And truly enough there followed one who made careful inquiries as to the movements of the Englishman, and heard his messages with a grim smile; but this was not Concepcion Vara.

It was late one evening when Conyngham, who had quitted Toledo in the morning, began to hunger for the sight of the towers and steeples of Madrid. He had ridden all day through the bare country of Cervantes, where to this day Spain rears her wittiest men and plainest women. The sun had just set behind the distant hills of old Castile, and from the east, over Aranjuez, where the great river cuts Spain in two parts, from its centre to the sea, a grey cloud -a very shade of night-was slowly rising. The aspect of the brown plains was dismal, and on the horizon the rolling, unbroken land seemed to melt away into eternity and infinite space. Conyngham reined in and looked around him. So far as eye could reach no house arose to testify to the presence of man. No laborer toiled home to his lonely hut, for in this country of many wars and interminable strife it has, since the days of Nebuchadnezzar, been the custom of the people to congregate in villages and small townships, where a common danger secured some protection against a lawless foe. The road

rose and fell in a straight line across the tableland without tree or hedge, and Madrid seemed to belong to another world, for the horizon, which was distant enough, bore no sign of cathedral spire or castled height.

Conyngham turned in his saddle to look back, and there, not a mile away, the form of a hurrying horseman broke the bare line of the dusty road. There was something weird and disturbing in this figure, a suggestion of pursuit in every line, for this was not Concepcion Vara. Conyngham would have known him at once. This was one wearing a better coat; indeed, Concepcion preferred to face life and the chances of the road in shirt-sleeves.

Conyngham sat in his saddle awaiting the newcomer. To meet on such a road in Spain without pausing to exchange a salutation would be a gratuitous insult; to ride in solitude within hail of another traveller were to excite or betray the deepest distrust. It was characteristic of Conyngham that he already waved his hand in salutation, and was prepared to hail the newcomer as the jolliest companion in the world.

Esteban Larralde, seeing the salutation, gave a short laugh, and jerked the reins of his tired horse. He himself wore a weary look, as if the flight he had in hand were an uphill one. He had long recognized Conyngham; indeed, the chase had been one of little excitement, but rather an exercise of patience and dogged perseverance. He raised his hat to indicate that the Englishman's gay salutations were perceived, and pulled the wide brim well forward again.

"He will change his attitude when it becomes apparent who I am," he muttered.

But Conyngham's first word would appear to suggest that Esteban Larralde was a much less impressive person than he considered himself.

"Why, it's the devout lover!" he cried. "Señor Larralde, you remember me-Algeciras-and your pink loveletter. Deuced fishy love-letter that. Nearly got me into a devil of a row, I can tell you. How are you-eh?"

What served to bring back the Englishman's wandering senses was the rumbling of heavy wheels and the crack of a great whip, as a cart laden with hay and drawn by six mules approached him from the direction of Toledo.

The driver of the team was an old soldier, as indeed were most of the Castilians at this time, and knew how to handle wounded men. With great care and a multitude of oaths he lifted Conyngham on to his cart and proceeded with him to Madrid.

From The Nineteenth Century. MR. HERBERT SPENCER AND LORD SALIS

BURY ON EVOLUTION.

PART I.

to

Mr. Herbert Spencer contributed this review in November, 1895, an article entitled "Lord Salisbury on Evolution." The occasion of it arose out of the brief and passing, but pungent, comments on the Darwinian the ory, which formed part of Lord Salisbury's presidential address to the British Association at Oxford in 1894. In so far as that article is merely a reply to Lord Salisbury, it is not my intention here to come between the distinguished disputants. But, like everything from Mr. Spencer's pen, it is full of highly significant matter on the whole subject to which it relates. It takes a much larger view of the problems of biology than is generally taken, and it deals with them by a method which is excellent, so far as he goes, and which we can all take up and follow farther than the point at which he stops. Nor is his paper less instructive because he does stop in the application of his method just where it ought to be most continuously and rigorously applied. The method of Mr. Spencer is to insist on a clear definition of the words and phrases used in our biological data and speculations. No method could be more admirable than this. It is one for which I have myself a great predilection, and have continually used in all

difficult subjects of inquiry. Such, preeminently, are the problems presented by the nature and history of organic life. I propose, therefore, in this paper to accept Mr. Spencer's method, and to examine what light can come from it on this most intricate of all subjects.

The leading idea of Mr. Spencer's article is to assert and insist upon a wide distinction between the "natural selection" theory of Darwin and the general theory of what Mr. Spencer calls "organic evolution." He insists and reiterates that even if Darwin's special theory of natural selection were disproved and abandoned, the more general doctrine of organic evolution would remain unshaken. I entirely agree in this discrimination between two quite separate conceptions. But I must demand a farther advance on the same lines-an advance which Mr. Spencer has not made, and which does not appear to have occurred to him as required. Not only is Darwin's special theory of natural selection quite separable from the more general theory of organic evolution, but also Mr. Spencer's special version and understanding of organic evolution is quite separable from the general doctrine of development, with which, nevertheless, it is habitually confounded. It is quite as true that even if Mr. Spencer's theory of organic evolution were disproved and abandoned, the general doctrine of development would remain unshaken, as it is true that organic evolution would survive the demolition of the Darwinian theory of natural selection.

The great importance of these discriminations lies in this-that both the narrow theory of Darwin, and also the wider idea of organic evolution, have derived an adventitious strength and popularity from elements of conception which are not their own-elements of conception, that is to say, which are not peculiar to them, but common to them and to a much larger conceptiona much wider doctrine-which has a much more indisputable place and rank in the facts of nature, and in the universal recognition of the human mind.

Let us, therefore, unravel this entanglement of separable ideas much more completely than Mr. Spencer has done in the article before us. And for this purpose let us begin at the bottomwith the one fundamental conception which underlies all the theories and speculations that litter the ground before us. That conception is simply represented by the old familiar word, and the old familiar idea-development. It is the conception of the whole world, in us and around us, being a world full of changes, which to-day leave nothing exactly as it was yesterday, and which will not allow to-morrow to be exactly as to-day. It is the conception of some things always coming to be, and of cther things always ceasing to be-in endless sequences of cause and of effect. It has this great advantage-that it is not a mere doctrine nor a theory, nor an hypothesis, but a visible and undoubted fact. Nobody can deny or dispute it. Nowhere has it been more profoundly expressed and described, in its deepest meanings and significance, than in the words of that great metaphysician-whoever he may be--who wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews, when he describes the universe as a system in which "the things which we see were not made of things that do appear." That is to say, that all its phenomena are due to causes which lie behind them, and which belong to the Invisible. Nor can we even conceive of its being otherwise. The causes of things-whatever these may be-are the sources out of which all things come, or are developed. What these causes are has been the great quest, and the great incentive to inquiry, since human thought began. But there never has been any doubt, or any failure, on the part of man to grasp the universal fact that there is a natural sequence among all things, leading from what has been to what is, and to what is to be. Whether he could apprehend or not the processes out of which these changes arise, he has always recognized the existence of such processes as a fact.

One might almost suppose from much of the talk we have had during

the last thirty years about development, that nobody had ever known or dwelt upon this universal fact until Lamarck and Darwin had discovered it. But all their theories, and, indeed, all possible theories which may sup plant or supplement them, are nothing but guesses at the details of the processes through which causation works its way from innumerable small beginnings to innumerable great and complicated results. Every one of these guesses may be wrong in whole, or in essential parts, but the universal facts of development in nature remain as certain and as obvious as before.

It is a bad thing, at least for a time, when the undoubtedness of a great general conception such as this-of the continuity of causation and of the gradual accumulation of its effectsgets hooked on (as it were) in the minds of theorists to their own little fragmentary fancies as to particular modes of operation. But it is a worse thing still when this spurious and accidental affiliation becomes so established in the popular mind that men are afraid not to accept the fancies lest they should be thought to impugn admitted and authoritative truths. Yet this is exactly what has happened with the Darwinian theory. The very word development was captured by the Darwinian school as if it belonged to them alone, and the old familiar idea was identified with theories with which it had no necessary connection whatever. Development is nowhere more conspicuous than in the history of human inventions; the gun, the watch, the steamengine, have all passed through many stages of development, every step in which is historically known. So it is with human social and political institutions, when they are at all advanced. But this kind and conception of development has nothing whatever to do with the purely physical conceptions involved in the Darwinian theory. The idea, for example, of one suggestion arising out of another in the constructive mind of man, is a kind of development absolutely different from the idea of one specific kind of organic