PART I. I. THE CASE STATED. AMERICAN juries render in each case which involves a felony a verdict of Guilty or Not Guilty. There must be many cases submitted to juries in which they cannot decide that the accused is " Guilty," and yet his innocence has not been so established as that they can pronounce him "Not Guilty." Scotch juries, in such a case, save the accused, while they avoid indorsing his character by bringing in a verdict which is a judgment made up, not upon the accused, but upon the allegations contained in the indictment, and that verdict is "Not Proven." Outside the court-house there must come for judgment before every thoughtful mind propositions, hypotheses, theories, which have some show of evidence, which can pro duce something to raise a suspicion, or even create a possibility, and perhaps some probability, of their truth, while so much known truth lies against one's accepting them that the only rational verdict that can be rendered is the Scotch verdict, "Not Proven." It seems that that is the status of the hypothesis of evolution. In many journals, in many lectures, in many conversations, we find it taken as a closed case which had gained a favorable verdict. Even sometimes we find this groundless assumption in our school-books. Moreover, books are written, and lectures delivered, and (save the mark!) sermons are delivered, which could have no coherency without the cool assump tion that evolution is as settled a scientific doctrine as the doctrine of gravitation. One writer, Mr. John Fiske ("Destiny of Man," p. 20), tells us that, man descended. from a stock of primates, back to which we may also trace the converging pedigrees of monkeys and lemurs, until their ancestry becomes indistinguishable from that of rabbits and squirrels. And then, apparently upon the supposition that he would not have a single well-informed reader, he ventures to tell us that there is no more reason for supposing that this conclusion will ever be gainsaid than for supposing that the Copernican astronomy will some time be overthrown and the concentric spheres of Dante's heaven reinstated in the minds of men. And this in face of the fact that the statement is rejected by a majority of the leading scientific men of this day, such men as Von Baer, Virchow, Barrande, Alfred Russel Wallace, Mivart, De Quatrefages, Dana, Dawson, Sir William Thomson, Carruthers, Clerk Maxwell, and others. Nothing could be farther from the fact than the statement that the doctrine of evolution is a settled scientific doctrine. Guyot says ("Creation," p. 128) that the question of evolution within each of these great systems-of matter into various forms of matter, of life into various forms of life, and of mankind into all its varieties-is still open. In this treatise from a mass of matter a few facts are selected, from the fair consideration of which it is believed that in this case the candid reader will conclude that the only verdict which can be rendered is the Scotch verdict, "Not Proven." Let us bear in mind that it is not undertaken to show that the evolution hypothesis is false, but simply to show that its advocates have not established its truth up to Christmas, A.D. 1885. II. DEFINITIONS. EVOLUTION is a word used to designate a certain theory of the universe. It may be represented as the doctrine which sets forth the production of all things from a primordial germ, by a process which has been described as a change from that which is homogeneous to that which is heterogeneous; from the indefinite and undetermined to that which is definite and determined; from the incoherent to the coherent; from the simple to the complex. The cause of this change is supposed to be in the ultimate laws of matter, force, and motion. Mr. Spencer, who, more than any other man, has endeavored to "elaborate a consistent philosophy |