DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. LINES READ AT THE CELEBRATION OF THE FOURTH OF JULY, IN KIRKVILLE, IOWA. BY M. A. DAVIES, (Athrywyn). Hail Columbia, blessed region, Of this Western sphere, Every innovation dying in probation, Land! dear land! all grieving-scorning, But the rampant British Lion, In this fruitful land But the sword and spear, battle without fear. Was too much to stand. Seventeen years and one long century No faint heart indeed had access Compromise on fusion, no such vague delusion, Independence, nothing less Ring the bells, ring, ring with frolic, O! proclaim in speech and letters And her yoke and burden setters, Driven to the sea! Succumb at last to talent; Monarch, duke, priest, prince and baron, God forbid that home oppression Let this land always demand Every millionaire and pauper By the gulf deep, wide and hated, As thy friend and neighbor, GRATITUDE. 209 BY MR. K. W. MATHEWS, COVINGTON, KY. Lord of Heaven and earth and seas, Whose goodness every creature speaks, A thousand thoughts each day declares Thou art The One Unchanging God. What shall those who owe so much With naught but gifts of Thine to pay, How talents lent, increasing care Each day conterred to Thee return. Every sphere Thy wisdom fills, Light and beauty each morning brings, Good and gracious is our Gol, Liberty triumphant, for the brave and gallant, All our joys from Thee descend, Rank and cast, imps of the past Bless them Lord with stronger faith, Increase our zeal and courage then, In every good and upward work. Fill our souls with grace divine, THE EVOLUTION OF MAN. BY PROFESSOR HENRY DRUMMOND. THE VISION OF EVOLUTION. These, nevertheless, are cold words with which to speak of a Vision-for Evolution after all is a vision-which is revolutionising the world of Nature and of thought, and, within living memory, has opened up avenues into the past and vistas into the future such as science has never witnessed before. While many of the details of the theory of Evolution are in the crucible of criticism, and while the field of modern science changes with such rapidity that in almost every department the text-books of ten years ago are obsolete to day, it is fair to add that no one of these changes, nor all of them together, have touched the general theory itself except to establish its strength, its value, and its universality. Even more remarkable than the rapidity of its conquest is the authority with which the doctrine of Development has seemed to speak to the most authoritative minds of our time. Of those who are in the front rank, of those who by their knowledge have, by common consent, the right to speak, there are scarcely any who do not in some form employ it in working and in thinking. Authority may mean little; the world has often been mistaken; but when minds so different as those of Charles Darwin or of T. H. Green, of Herbert Spencer or of Robert Browning, build half the labours of their life on this one law, it is impossible, and especially in the absence of any other even com peting principle at the psesent hour, to treat it as a baseless dream. Only the peculiar nature of this great generalisation can account for the extraordinary enthusiasm of this acceptance. Evolution involves not so much a change of opinion as a change in man's whole view of the world and of life. It is not the statement of a mathematical proposition which men are called upon to declare true or false, It is a method of looking upon nature. Science for centuries devoted itself to the cataloguing of facts and the discovery of laws, Each worker toiled in his own little place-the geologist in his quarry, the botanist in his garden, the biologist, in his lab. atory, the astronomer in his observatory, the historian in his library, the archaeologist in his museum. Suddenly these workers looked up: they spoke to one another; they had each discovered a law, they whispered its name. It was the same word that went round. They had each discov ered Evolution. Henceforth their work was one, science was one, the world was one, and mind, which discovered the oneness, was one. ALL THINGS ARE RISING. But this is not the whole result of this discovery. The doctrine of Evolution has ushered a new hope into the world. Nature is to be read not only with the eyes, but with the mind; but with the soul. If Man, and all that is in Man, are to be the subjects of Evolution, Man and all that is in Man must view the process, must form the audience, must pronounce upon the meaning or the meaninglessness of the spectacle. Summoned to this task, the whole Man summoned, there can be but one verdict as to the im port of Evolution, as to its bearing upon the individual life, and the future of the race. The supreme message of Science to this age is that all THE EVOLUTION OF MAN. Nature is on the side of the man who tries to rise. Evolution, development, progress are not only on her programme, these are her programme. For all things are rising, all worlds, all planets, all stars and suns. An ascending energy is in the universe, and the whole moves on with one mighty idea and anticipation. The aspiration in the human mind and heart is but the evolutionary tendency of the universe becoming conscious. Darwin's great discovery, or the discovery which he brought into prominance, is the same as Galileo's that the world moves. The Italian prophet said it moves from west to east; the English philosopher said it moves from low to high. And this is the last and most splendid contribution of Science to the faith of the world. THE HOPE OF EVOLUTION. The discovery of a second motion in the earth has come into the world of thought only in time to save it from despair. As in the days of Galileo, there are many even now who do not see that the world moves-men to whom the earth is but an endless plain, a prison fixed in a purposeless universe where untried prisoners await their unknown fate. It is not the monotony of life which destroys men, but its pointlessness; they can bear its weight, its meaninglessness crushes them. But the same great revolution that the discovery of the axial rotation of the earth effected in the realm of physics, the announcement of the doctrine of Evolution makes in the moral world. Already, even in these days of its dawn, a sudden and marvelous light has fallen upon earth and heaven. Evolution is less a doctrine than a light; it is a light revealing in the chaos of the past a perfect and growing order, giving meaning even to the confusion of the present, discovering through 211 all the deviousness around us the paths of progress and flashing its rays already upon a coming goal. Men begin to see an undeviating ethical purpose in this material world, a tide, that from eternity has never turned, making for perfectness. In that vast progression of Nature, that vision of all things from the first of time moving from low to high, from incompleteness to completeness, from imperfection to perfection, and moral nature recognizes in all its height and depth the eternal claim upon itself. Wholeness and perfection-Holiness and Righteousness-these have always been required of Man. But never before on the natural plane have they been proclaimed by voices so commanding, or enforced by sanctions so great and rational. "The study of the historical development of man," says Prof. Edward Caird, "especially in respect of his higher life, is not only a matter of external or merely speculative curiosity; it is closely connected with the development of that life in ourselves. For we learn to know ourselves, first of all, in the mirror of the world; or, in other words our knowledge of our own nature and of its possibilities grows and deepens with our understanding of what is without us, and most of all with our understanding of the general history of man. It has often been noticed that there is a certain analogy between the life of the individual and that of the race, and even that the life of the individual is a sort of epitome of the history of humanity. But, as Plato has already discovered, it is by reading the large letters that we learn to interpret the small. . . . . It is only through a deepened consciousness of the world that the human spirit can solve its own problem. Especially is this true in the region of anthropology. For the inner life of the individual is deep and full just in proportion to the width of his relations to other men and things; and his consciousness of what he is in himself as a spiritual being is dependent on a comprehension of the position of his individual life in the great secular process by which the intellectual and moral life of humanity has grown and is growing. Hence the highest practical, as well as speculative interests of men are connected with the new extension of science which has given fresh interest and meaning to the whole history of the race." The lecturer then proceeded to his subject proper by giving an account of the EVOLUTION OF THE ANIMAL MAN. The embryo of the future man begins life, like the primitive savage, in a one-roomed hut, a single simple cell. This cell is round and almost microscopic in size. When fully formed it measures only one-tenth of a line in diameter, and with the naked eye can be barely discerned as a very fine point. An outer covering, transparent as glass, surrounds this little sphere, and in the interior, embedded in protoplasm, lies a bright globular spot. In form, in size, in composition there is no apparent difference between this human cell and that of any other mammal. The dog, the elephant, the lion, the ape, and a thousand others begin their widely different lives in a house the same as man's. At an earlier, stage, indeed, before it had taken on its pellucid covering, this cell has affinities still more astonishing; for at that remoter period, the earlier forms of all living things, both plant and animal, are one. It is one of the most astonishing facts of human science that the first embryonic abodes of moss and fern and pine, of shark and crab and coral polyp, of lizard, leopard, monkey and man are so exactly similar that the highest powers of mind and microscope fail to trace the smallest distinction between them. "Even under the highest magnifying power of the best microscope," says Hackel, "there appears to be no essential difference between the eggs of man, of the ape, of the dog, etc. This does not mean that they are not really different in these different mammals. On the contrary, we must assume that such differences, at least in point of chemical constitution, exist univer sally. In accordance with the law of individual variation, we must assume that all individual organisms are from the very begining of their individual existence, different though often very similar. But with our rough and incomplete apparatus we are not in a position actually to perceive these delicate individual differences which must often be sought in the molecular structure." But let us watch the development of this one-called human embryo. Increase of rooms in architecture can can be effected in either of two ways— by building entirely new rooms, or by partitioning old ones. Both of these methods are employed in Nature. The first, gemmation, or budding, is common among the lower forms of life,. The second, differentiation by partition, or segmentations, is the ap proved method among higher animals and is that adopted in the case of man. It proceeds, after the fertilized ovum has completed the complex preliminaries of karyokinesis, by the division of the inner contents into two equal parts, so that the original cell is now occupied by two nucleated cells with the old cell-wall surrounding them outside. The two-roomed house is, in the next development, and by a similar process of segmenta tion, developed into a structure of four rooms, and this into one of eight, and so on. THE WELSH POPULATION IN the United States. When the multicellular globe, made up of countless offshoots or divisions of the original pair, has reached a certain size, its centre becomes filled with a tiny lakelet of watery fluid. This fluid gradually increases in quantity, and pushing the cells outward, packs into a single layer, circumscribing it on every side with an elastic wall. At one part a dimple soon ap pears, which slowly deepens until a complete hollow is formed, the invagination of the sphere being carried so far that the cell at the bottom of the hollow touch those at the opposite side. The ovum has now become an Open bag or cup--a cup such as one night make by doubling in an indiarubber ball--the gastrula of biology. The great evolution interest of this development lies in the fact that Probably all animals above the Protozoa pass through this gastrula stage. That some of the lower Metazoa, indeed, never develope much beyond it a glance at the structure of a humbler Coelenterates will show-the simplest of all illustrations of the fact that embryonic forms of higher animals are usually permanently repreSented by the adult forms of lower. The chief thing, however, to note here is the doubling-in of the ovum to gain a double instead of a single wall of Cells. For these two different layers the ectoderm and the endoderm, or the animal layer and the vegetal layer -play a unique part in the after-history; all the organs of movement and sensation spring from the one, all the Organs of nutrition and reproduction develope from the other. In a short time the number of Chambers is so great that count is lost, and the activity becomes so vigorous in every direction that one ceases to notice individual cells at all. The tenement, in fact, consists now of innumerable groups of cells congregated together, suites of apartments, 213 as it were, which have quickly arranged themselves in symmetrical, definite, and withal different forms. Were these forms not different as well as definite we should hardly call it an evolution, nor should we characterise the resulting aggregation as a higher organism. A hundred cottages placed in a row would never make a castle. What makes the castle superior to the hundred cottages is not the number of its rooms, for they are possibly fewer; nor their difference in shape, for that is immaterial. It lies in the number and nature and variety of useful purposes to which the rooms are put, the perfection with which each is adapted to its end, and the harmonious co-operation among them with reference to some common work. This also is the dis tinction between a higher animal and a humble creature like the centipede or the worm, which are but aggregations of similar segments. The fact that any growing embryo is passing through a real development is decided by the complexity of structure, by the more perfect division of labour, and of better kinds of labour, and by the increase in range and efficiency of the correlated functions discharged by the whole. In the development of the human embryo the differentiating and integrating forces are steadily acting and co-operating from the first, so that the result is not a mere aggregation of similar cells, but an organism with many different parts and many varied functions. THE WELSH POPULATION IN THE U. S. OF AMERICA. BY REV. W. R. EVANS PENIEL, JACKSON, CO., OHIO. In the May issue of the CAMBRIAN, we find an interesting and valuable report of the Welsh population of the U. S., compiled by the learned Editor. |