tion, either an ancestral wasp must have accidentally stung them in the right place, and so our sphex of to-day is the naturally selected descendant of a line of insects which inherited this lucky tendency to sting different insects differently, but always in the exact situation of their nervous ganglia; or else the young of the ancestral sphex originally fed on dead food, but the offspring of some individuals, who happened to sting their prey so as to paralyze but not kill them, were better nourished, and so the habit grew. But the incredible supposition that the ancestor should accidentally have acquired the habit of stinging different insects differently, but always in the right spot, is not eliminated by the latter hypothesis.

Now, according to evolution, whatever exists must have sprung from something with which it is still connected, that is to say, evolution demands continuity of developHere we have whole classes of actions performed by all kinds of animals to which they are impelled, by what we call instinct, and evolution has not been able to find a place for instinct.

ment.

X.-LANGUAGE.

THE races of inferior animals which existed six thousand years ago ought to have made

some appreciable approach by this time to what man was then, while man should have advanced. But the facts show that it is not

so.

Between a gorilla and Laura Bridgman, for instance, what a chasm! She is almost entirely cut off from the use of the five senses, and yet her intellect is comparatively highly developed; while the most lively of all the inferior animals can only be taught some tricks of imitation. The gorilla is said to possess vocal organs similar to the human. He has had them as long as man-longer, according to some evolutionists—and yet he cannot form a language, nor, so far as we know, even be taught a language, nor the notes of music.

Professor Max Müller, in a very interesting article on Forgotten Bibles," in the Nineteenth Century, 1885, writing of this topic, says:

As language had been pointed out as a Rubicon which no beast had ever crossed, Darwin lent a willing ear to those who think that they can derive language, that is, real logos, from interjections and mimicry, by a process of spontaneous evolution, and produced himself some most persuasive arguments.

We know how able, how persuasive, a pleader Darwin could be. When he wished to show how man could have descended from an animal which was born hairy and remained so during life,* he could not well maintain that an animal without hair was fitter to survive than an animal with hair. He therefore wished us to believe that our female semihuman pregenitors lost their hair by some accident, were, as Hermann said, "minus belluinæ facie et indole," and that in the process of sexual selection this partial or complete baldness was considered an attraction, and was thus perpetuated from mother to son. It was difficult, no doubt, to give up Milton's Eve for a semi-human progenitor, suffering, it may be, from leprosy or leucoderma, yet Darwin, like Gottfried Hermann, nearly persuaded us to do so. However, in defending so hopeless, or, at all events, so unfortified a position as the transition of the cries of animals into the language of man, even so great a general as Darwin undoubtedly was will occasionally encounter defeat, and I believe I may say without presumption, that, to speak of no other barrier between man and beast, the barrier of language remains as unshaken as ever, and renders every attempt at deriving man genealogically from any known or unknown ape, for the present,. at least, impossible, or, at all events, unscientific.

'Descent of Man, vol. ii., p. 377, where more details may be found as to the exact process of baldness or denudation in animals.

Is more east 1: tel what

in that via is snx power of

]TOI. IF zomparison.. or reasocing, or

memory or fancy, or imagination; nor is it admined to be the product of all these. Tet it uses al these, and quickens them, and is superior to them. How is it produced? Heredity can be employed by evolution to account for physical and mental traits. The run of proclivities, propensities, tendencies, talents, may be accounted for

by heredity and traced down successive descendants of families. But where does genius come from? Sometimes—not often—it falls on the member of a family which has exhibited talent. Usually it comes on the man who has had no ancestor distinguished from the mass of men. He starts like a star out of a rayless sky. Genius comes parentless and goes childless. Genius is the Melchisedek of mind, "without father, without mother, without descent." In an article by M. Caro, of the Institute of France, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, in which he exposes the fallacies of Galton's " Heredity of Genius," he says:

Those sovereign minds, precisely by what they possess that is incommunicable, rise high and alone above the floods of generations which precede and follow them. . . . Those exalted originals who tower above mankind have no fathers and no sons' in the blood.

If evolution be true, genius would be the product of what went before and would carry the results of previous mental progress involved in itself to be evolved into other genius. But the fact is against the theory, and